orks on those mystic sciences, and set all
the powers of his mind at work on experiments.

Noble and generous spirits are ye, who, with small care for fame, and
little reward from pelf, have opened to the intellects of the poor the
portals of wisdom! I honour and revere ye; only do not think ye have
done all that is needful. Consider, I pray ye, whether so good a choice
from the tinker's bag would have been made by a boy whom religion
had not scared from the Pestilent, and genius had not led to the
self-improving. And Lenny did not wholly escape from the mephitic
portions of the motley elements from which his awakening mind drew its
nurture. Think not it was all pure oxygen that the panting lip drew in.
No; there were still those inflammatory tracts. Political I do not like
to call them, for politics means the art of government, and the tracts I
speak of assailed all government which mankind has hitherto recognized.
Sad rubbish, perhaps, were such tracts to you, O sound thinker, in your
easy-chair! or to you, practised statesman, at your post on the Treasury
Bench; to you, calm dignitary of a learned Church; or to you, my lord
judge, who may often have sent from your bar to the dire Orcus
of Norfolk's Isle the ghosts of men whom that rubbish, falling
simultaneously on the bumps of acquisitiveness and combativeness, hath
untimely slain! Sad rubbish to you! But seems it such rubbish to the
poor man, to whom it promises a paradise on the easy terms of upsetting
a world? For, ye see, those "Appeals to Operatives" represent that
same world-upsetting as the simplest thing imaginable,--a sort of
two-and-two-make-four proposition. The poor have only got to set
their strong hands to the axle, and heave-a-boy! and hurrah for
the topsy-turvy! Then just to put a little wholesome rage into the
heave-a-hoy! it is so facile to accompany the eloquence of "Appeals"
with a kind of stir-the-bile-up statistics,--"Abuses of the
aristocracy," "Jobs of the Priesthood," "Expenses of the Army kept up
for Peers' younger sons," "Wars contracted for the villanous purpose of
raising the rents of the landowners,"--all arithmetically dished up,
and seasoned with tales of every gentleman who has committed a misdeed,
every clergyman who has dishonoured his cloth; as if such instances were
fair specimens of average gentlemen and ministers of religion! All this,
passionately advanced (and, observe, never answered, for that literature
admits no controvers