you may say, "after they
have learned to ride, and fence, and sing, and know birds and flowers,
it will be little to their liking to make themselves into tailors,
carpenters, shoemakers, blacksmiths, and the like." And I cannot but
agree with you as to the exceeding probability of some such reluctance
on their part, which will be a very awkward state of things indeed,
(since we can by no means get on without tailoring and shoemaking,)
and one to be meditated upon very seriously in next letter.

102. P.S.--Thank you for sending me your friend's letter about Gustave
Dore; he is wrong, however, in thinking there is any good in those
illustrations of 'Elaine.' I had intended to speak of them afterwards,
for it is to my mind quite as significant--almost as awful--a sign of
what is going on in the midst of us, that our great English poet
should have suffered his work to be thus contaminated, as that the
lower Evangelicals, never notable for sense in the arts, should have
got their Bibles dishonored. Those 'Elaine' illustrations are just as
impure as anything else that Dore has done; but they are also vapid,
and without any one merit whatever in point of art. The illustrations
to the 'Contes Drolatiques' are full of power and invention; but those
to 'Elaine' are merely and simply stupid; theatrical betises, with
the taint of the charnel-house on them besides.

LETTER XVII.

THE RELATIONS OF EDUCATION TO POSITION IN LIFE.

_April 3, 1867._

103. I am not quite sure that you will feel the awkwardness of the
dilemma I got into at the end of last letter, as much as I do myself.
You working men have been crowing and peacocking at such a rate
lately; and setting yourselves forth so confidently for the cream of
society, and the top of the world, that perhaps you will not
anticipate any of the difficulties which suggest themselves to a
thoroughbred Tory and Conservative, like me. Perhaps you will expect a
youth properly educated--a good rider--musician--and well-grounded
scholar in natural philosophy, to think it a step of promotion when he
has to go and be made a tailor of, or a coalheaver? If you do, I
should very willingly admit that you might be right, and go on to the
farther development of my notions without pausing at this
stumbling-block, were it not that, unluckily, all the wisest men whose
sayings I ever heard or read, agree in expressing (one way or another)