lerant to those above him--kings and
nobles and priests, dynasties and parliaments and establishments, with
all their doings, most of their enactments, their forms, their rights,
their claims, were to him an abomination, all rubbish; he found no use
or pleasure in them, and believed it would be clear gain, and no damage
to the world, if its high places were razed, and their occupants crushed
in the fall. The want of veneration, too, made him dead at heart to the
electric delight of admiring what is admirable; it dried up a thousand
pure sources of enjoyment; it withered a thousand vivid pleasures. He
was not irreligious, though a member of no sect; but his religion could
not be that of one who knows how to venerate. He believed in God and
heaven; but his God and heaven were those of a man in whom awe,
imagination, and tenderness lack.

The weakness of his powers of comparison made him inconsistent; while he
professed some excellent general doctrines of mutual toleration and
forbearance, he cherished towards certain classes a bigoted antipathy.
He spoke of "parsons" and all who belonged to parsons, of "lords" and
the appendages of lords, with a harshness, sometimes an insolence, as
unjust as it was insufferable. He could not place himself in the
position of those he vituperated; he could not compare their errors with
their temptations, their defects with their disadvantages; he could not
realize the effect of such and such circumstances on himself similarly
situated, and he would often express the most ferocious and tyrannical
wishes regarding those who had acted, as he thought, ferociously and
tyrannically. To judge by his threats, he would have employed arbitrary,
even cruel, means to advance the cause of freedom and equality.
Equality! yes, Mr. Yorke talked about equality, but at heart he was a
proud man--very friendly to his workpeople, very good to all who were
beneath him, and submitted quietly to be beneath him, but haughty as
Beelzebub to whomsoever the world deemed (for he deemed no man) his
superior. Revolt was in his blood: he could not bear control; his
father, his grandfather before him, could not bear it, and his children
after him never could.

The want of general benevolence made him very impatient of imbecility,
and of all faults which grated on his strong, shrewd nature; it left no
check to his cutting sarcasm. As he was not merciful, he would sometimes
wound and wound again, without noticing how much