e ladies look down beneficently, and smile on the poorer
folk. They buy a yard of ribbon with affability; they condescend to
purchase an ounce of salts, or a packet of flower-seeds: they deign to
cheapen a goose: their drive is like a royal progress; a happy people
is supposed to press round them and bless them. Tradesmen bow, farmers'
wives bob, town-boys, waving their ragged hats, cheer the red-faced
coachman as he drives the fat bays, and cry, "Sir Miles for ever! Throw
us a halfpenny, my lady!"

But suppose the market-woman should hide her fat goose when Sir Miles's
coach comes, out of terror lest my lady, spying the bird, should insist
on purchasing it a bargain? Suppose no coppers ever were known to come
out of the royal coach window? Suppose Sir Miles regaled his tenants
with notoriously small beer, and his poor with especially thin broth?
This may be our fine old English gentleman's way. There have been not a
few fine English gentlemen and ladies of this sort; who patronised the
poor without ever relieving them, who called out "Amen!" at church
as loud as the clerk; who went through all the forms of piety, and
discharged all the etiquette of old English gentlemanhood; who bought
virtue a bargain, as it were, and had no doubt they were honouring
her by the purchase. Poor Harry in his distress asked help from his
relations: his aunt sent him a tract and her blessing; his uncle had
business out of town, and could not, of course, answer the poor boy's
petition. How much of this behaviour goes on daily in respectable life,
think you? You can fancy Lord and Lady Macbeth concocting a murder,
and coming together with some little awkwardness, perhaps, when the
transaction was done and over; but my Lord and Lady Skinflint, when they
consult in their bedroom about giving their luckless nephew a helping
hand, and determine to refuse, and go down to family prayers, and meet
their children and domestics, and discourse virtuously before them, and
then remain together, and talk nose to nose,--what can they think of one
another? and of the poor kinsman fallen among the thieves, and groaning
for help unheeded? How can they go on with those virtuous airs? How can
they dare look each other in the face?

Dare? Do you suppose they think they have done wrong? Do you suppose
Skinflint is tortured with remorse at the idea of the distress which
called to him in vain, and of the hunger which he sent empty away? Not
he. He is indignant wi