ney and look pleasant' without talking about it,
I shouldn't mind; but they _will_ make it a subject of
conversation, as though everyone who liked his glass of wine should
converse upon 'the vintages.' One looks for it in business people
and forgives it; but everyone is now for business.

The reverence that used to belong to Death is now only paid to it
in the case of immensely rich persons, whose wealth is spoken of
with bated breath. 'He died, sir, worth two millions; a very warm
man.' If you happen to say, though with all reasonable probability
and even with Holy Writ to back you, 'He is probably warmer by this
time,' you are looked upon as a Communist. What the man was is
nothing, what he made is everything. It is the gold alone that we
now value: the temple that might have sanctified the gold is of no
account. This worship of mere wealth has, it is true, this
advantage over the old adoration of birth, that something may
possibly be got out of it; to cringe and fawn upon the people that
have blue blood is manifestly futile, since the peculiarity is not
communicable, but it is hoped that, by being shaken up in the same
social bag with millionaires, something may be attained by what is
technically called the 'sweating' process. So far as I have
observed, however, the results are small, while the operation is to
the last degree disagreeable.

What is very significant of this new sort of golden age is that a
literature of its own has arisen, though of an anomalous kind. It
is presided over by a sort of male Miss Kilmansegge, who is also a
model of propriety. It is as though the dragon that guarded the
apples of Hesperides should be a dragon of virtue. Under the
pretence of extolling prudence and perseverance, he paints
money-making as the highest good, and calls it thrift; and the
popularity of this class of book is enormous. The heroes are all
'self-made' men who come to town with that proverbial half-crown
which has the faculty of accumulation that used to be confined to
snowballs. Like the daughters of the horse-leech, their cry is
'Give, give,' only instead of blood they want money; and I need
hardly say they get it from other people's pockets. Love and
friendship are names that have lost their meaning, if they ever
had any, with these gentry. They remind one of the miser of old who
could not hear a large sum of money mentioned without an ac