e. They do not know what
others do in the way of helping, pleasing, or teaching their race; they
will not trouble themselves to inquire. Whoever is not in trade is
accused of eating the bread of idleness, of passing a useless existence.
Long may it be ere England really becomes a nation of shop-keepers!

We have already said that Moore was no self-sacrificing patriot, and we
have also explained what circumstances rendered him specially prone to
confine his attention and efforts to the furtherance of his individual
interest; accordingly, when he felt himself urged a second time to the
brink of ruin, none struggled harder than he against the influences
which would have thrust him over. What he _could_ do towards stirring
agitation in the north against the war he did, and he instigated others
whose money and connections gave them more power than he possessed.
Sometimes, by flashes, he felt there was little reason in the demands
his party made on Government. When he heard of all Europe threatened by
Bonaparte, and of all Europe arming to resist him; when he saw Russia
menaced, and beheld Russia rising, incensed and stern, to defend her
frozen soil, her wild provinces of serfs, her dark native despotism,
from the tread, the yoke, the tyranny of a foreign victor--he knew that
England, a free realm, could not _then_ depute her sons to make
concessions and propose terms to the unjust, grasping French leader.
When news came from time to time of the movements of that MAN then
representing England in the Peninsula, of his advance from success to
success--that advance so deliberate but so unswerving, so circumspect
but so certain, so "unhasting" but so "unresting;" when he read Lord
Wellington's own dispatches in the columns of the newspapers, documents
written by modesty to the dictation of truth--Moore confessed at heart
that a power was with the troops of Britain, of that vigilant, enduring,
genuine, unostentatious sort, which must win victory to the side it led,
in the end. In the end! But that end, he thought, was yet far off; and
meantime he, Moore, as an individual, would be crushed, his hopes ground
to dust. It was himself he had to care for, his hopes he had to pursue;
and he would fulfil his destiny.

He fulfilled it so vigorously that ere long he came to a decisive
rupture with his old Tory friend the rector. They quarrelled at a public
meeting, and afterwards exchanged some pungent letters in the
newspapers. Mr. Helsto