in property."

We believe it sincerely and heartily. The great writers of all ages have
believed it. Your low-minded scribblers have never doubted it; but it is
far easier to depict the limited class, with its violence and felony,
its startling incidents and painful murders--far less difficult to give
picturesque effect to its nauseous jargon and offensive situations, than
it is to work the simple portraiture of a whole community, who have
nothing to offer to the artist but the delicate and unobtrusive
material, such as Goldsmith could weave into a fabric whose colour and
texture shall endure and enchant for all time.

"I feel," continues M. Michelet, with great tenderness--"I feel I am
alone, and I should be sad indeed if I had not with me my faith and
hope. I see myself weak, both by nature and my previous works, in
presence of this mighty subject, as at the foot of a gigantic monument,
that I must move all alone. Alas! how disfigured it is to-day; how
loaded with foreign accumulations, moss, and mouldiness; spoilt by the
rain and mud, and by the injuries it has received from passengers! The
painter, the man of _art for art_, comes and looks at it; what pleases
him is precisely that moss. But I would pluck it off. Painter, now
passing by! This is not a plaything of art--this is our altar!"

"To know the life of the people, their toils and sufferings," he
continues, "I have but to interrogate my own memory." He has himself
sprung from the labouring population. Before he wrote books, he
_composed_ them in the literal sense of that term. He arranged letters
before he grouped ideas; the sadness of the workshop, and the
wearisomeness of long hours, are things known to his experience. The
short narrative of his early struggles forms another beautiful passage
in this singular and very unequal production. The great lesson which he
brought with him from his season of difficulty and affliction, is one
that authorizes him to approach the people as a teacher and a friend,
and ought to have inspired him with nobler aims than he puts forth
to-day. He has seen the disorders of destitution, the vices of misery;
but he has seldom found them extinguishing original goodness of heart,
or interfering with the noble sentiments that adorn the lowest as well
as the highest of mankind. There is nothing new, he tells us, in this
observation. At the time of the cholera in France, every body beheld one
class eager to adopt the orphan children