to the expression of a Fiend, looking far and
anxiously into futurity, as if foreseeing there what antagonism was
about to be created to the schemes of secret crime and unrelenting
force; the chivalrous head of the accomplished Rivers, seen but in
profile, under his helmet, as if the age when Chivalry must defend its
noble attributes in steel was already half passed away; and, not least
grand of all, the rude thews and sinews of the artisan forced into
service on the type, and the ray of intellect, fierce, and menacing
revolutions yet to be, struggling through his rugged features, and
across his low knitted brow,--all this, which showed how deeply the
idea of the discovery in its good and its evil, its saving light and
its perilous storms, had sunk into the artist's soul, charmed me as
effecting the exact union between sentiment and execution, which is the
true and rare consummation of the Ideal in Art. But observe, while
in these personages of the group are depicted the deeper and graver
agencies implicated in the bright but terrible invention, observe how
little the light epicures of the hour heed the scowl of the monk, or the
restless gesture of Richard, or the troubled gleam in the eyes of the
artisan, King Edward, handsome Poco curante, delighted in the surprise
of a child, with a new toy, and Clarence, with his curious, yet
careless, glance,--all the while Caxton himself, calm, serene,
untroubled, intent solely upon the manifestation of his discovery, and
no doubt supremely indifferent whether the first proofs of it shall be
dedicated to a Rivers or an Edward, a Richard or a Henry, Plantagenet or
Tudor--'t is all the same to that comely, gentle-looking man. So is it
ever with your Abstract Science!--not a jot cares its passionless logic
for the woe or weal of a generation or two. The stream, once emerged
from its source, passes on into the great Intellectual Sea, smiling over
the wretch that it drowns, or under the keel of the ship which it serves
as a slave.

Now, when about to commence the present chapter on the Varieties
of Life, this masterpiece of thoughtful art forced itself on my
recollection, and illustrated what I designed to convey. In the surface
of every age it is often that which but amuses for the moment the
ordinary children of pleasant existence, the Edwards and the Clarences
(be they kings and dukes, or simplest of simple subjects), which
afterwards towers out as the great serious epoch of the ti