animity.

"The same thing is going on throughout the whole country! Work is now
required from every man who receives wages!" And had he been living
all his life receiving wages and doing no work? Had he in truth so
lived as to be now in his old age justly reckoned as rubbish fit only
to be hidden away in some huge dust-hole? The school of men to whom
he professes to belong, the Grantlys, the Gwynnes, and the old high
set of Oxford divines, are afflicted with no such self-accusations as
these which troubled Mr. Harding. They, as a rule, are as satisfied
with the wisdom and propriety of their own conduct as can be any
Mr. Slope, or any Dr. Proudie, with his own. But unfortunately for
himself Mr. Harding had little of this self-reliance. When he heard
himself designated as rubbish by the Slopes of the world, he had no
other resource than to make inquiry within his own bosom as to the
truth of the designation. Alas, alas! The evidence seemed generally
to go against him.

He had professed to himself in the bishop's parlour that in these
coming sources of the sorrow of age, in these fits of sad regret from
which the latter years of few reflecting men can be free, religion
would suffice to comfort him. Yes, religion could console him for
the loss of any worldly good, but was his religion of that active
sort which would enable him so to repent of misspent years as to pass
those that were left to him in a spirit of hope for the future? And
such repentance itself, is it not a work of agony and of tears? It
is very easy to talk of repentance, but a man has to walk over hot
ploughshares before he can complete it; to be skinned alive as was
St. Bartholomew; to be stuck full of arrows as was St. Sebastian; to
lie broiling on a gridiron like St. Lorenzo! How if his past life
required such repentance as this? Had he the energy to go through
with it?

Mr. Harding, after leaving the palace, walked slowly for an hour or
so beneath the shady elms of the close and then betook himself to his
daughter's house. He had at any rate made up his mind that he would
go out to Plumstead to consult Dr. Grantly, and that he would in the
first instance tell Eleanor what had occurred.

And now he was doomed to undergo another misery. Mr. Slope had
forestalled him at the widow's house. He had called there on the
preceding afternoon. He could not, he had said, deny himself the
pleasure of telling Mrs. Bold that her father was about to return to
the p