useway of its youthful pilgrimage? What would have happened
to myself, so directed, I cannot clearly imagine. Possibly, I might have
got interested in the old iron and wood-shavings; and become an engineer
or a carpenter: but for the children of to-day, accustomed, from the
instant they are out of their cradles, to the sight of this infinite
nastiness, prevailing as a fixed condition of the universe, over the
face of nature, and accompanying all the operations of industrious man,
what is to be the scholastic issue? unless, indeed, the thrill of
scientific vanity in the primary analysis of some unheard-of process of
corruption--or the reward of microscopic research in the sight of worms
with more legs, and acari of more curious generation than ever vivified
the more simply smelling plasma of antiquity.

One result of such elementary education is, however, already certain;
namely, that the pleasure which we may conceive taken by the children of
the coming time, in the analysis of physical corruption, guides, into
fields more dangerous and desolate, the expatiation of an imaginative
literature: and that the reactions of moral disease upon itself, and
the conditions of languidly monstrous character developed in an
atmosphere of low vitality, have become the most valued material of
modern fiction, and the most eagerly discussed texts of modern
philosophy.

5. The many concurrent reasons for this mischief may, I believe, be
massed under a few general heads.[38]

I. There is first the hot fermentation and unwholesome secrecy of the
population crowded into large cities, each mote in the misery lighter,
as an individual soul, than a dead leaf, but becoming oppressive and
infectious each to his neighbor, in the smoking mass of decay. The
resulting modes of mental ruin and distress are continually new; and in
a certain sense, worth study in their monstrosity: they have accordingly
developed a corresponding science of fiction, concerned mainly with the
description of such forms of disease, like the botany of leaf-lichens.

In De Balzac's story of _Father Goriot_, a grocer makes a large fortune,
of which he spends on himself as much as may keep him alive; and on his
two daughters, all that can promote their pleasures or their pride. He
marries them to men of rank, supplies their secret expenses, and
provides for his favorite a separate and clandestine establishment with
her lover. On his death-bed, he sends for this favorite daug