comforts as men in order to share the public troubles of mankind? If
ever you have so far departed from the Lucretian philosophy, just look
back--was it life at all that you lived? Were you an individual
distinct existence,--a passenger in the railway,--or were you merely
an indistinct portion of that common flame which heated the boiler and
generated the steam that set off the monster train?--very hot, very
active, very useful, no doubt; but all your identity fused in flame, and
all your forces vanishing in gas.

And do you think the people in the railway carriages care for you? Do
you think that the gentleman in the worsted wrapper is saying to his
neighbour with the striped rug on his comfortable knees, "How grateful
we ought to be for that fiery particle which is crackling and hissing
under the boiler. It helps us on a fraction of an inch from Vauxhall
to Putney!" Not a bit of it. Ten to one but he is saying, "Not sixteen
miles an hour! What the deuce is the matter with the stoker?"

Look at our friend Audley Egerton. You have just had a glimpse of the
real being that struggles under the huge copper; you have heard the
hollow sound of the rich man's coffers under the tap of Baron Levy's
friendly knuckle, heard the strong man's heart give out its dull warning
sound to the scientific ear of Dr. F-----. And away once more vanishes
the separate existence, lost again in the flame that heats the boiler,
and the smoke that curls into air from the grimy furnace.

Look to it, O Public Man, whoever thou art, and whatsoever thy
degree,--see if thou canst not compound matters, so as to keep a little
nook apart for thy private life; that is, for thyself! Let the Great
Popkins Question not absorb wholly the individual soul of thee, as Smith
or Johnson. Don't so entirely consume thyself under that insatiable
boiler, that when thy poor little monad rushes out from the sooty
furnace, and arrives at the stars, thou mayest find no vocation for
thee there, and feel as if thou hadst nothing to do amidst the still
splendours of the Infinite. I don't deny to thee the uses of "Public
Life;" I grant that it is much to have helped to carry that Great
Popkins Question; but Private Life, my friend, is the life of thy
private soul; and there may be matters concerned with that which, on
consideration, thou mayest allow cannot be wholly mixed up with the
Great Popkins Question, and were not finally settled when thou didst
exclaim, "I have not