r,
to save the souls of men: contrast him with a man professing to
do little but shoot the partridges of men! I wish he could find
the point again, this Speaking One; and stick to it with
tenacity, with deadly energy; for there is need of him yet! The
Speaking Function, this of Truth coming to us with a living
voice, nay in a living shape, and as a concrete practical
exemplar: this, with all our Writing and Printing Functions, has
a perennial place. Could he but find the point again,--take the
old spectacles off his nose, and looking up discover, almost in
contact with him, what the _real_ Satanas, and soul-devouring,
world-devouring _Devil,_ now is! Original Sin and such like are
bad enough, I doubt not: but distilled Gin, dark Ignorance,
Stupidity, dark Corn-Law, Bastille and Company, what are they!
_Will_ he discover our new real Satan, whom he has to fight; or
go on droning through his old nose-spectacles about old extinct
Satans; and never see the real one, till he _feel_ him at his
own throat and ours? That is a question, for the world! Let us
not intermeddle with it here.

Sorrowful, phantasmal as this same Double Aristocracy of Teachers
and Governors now looks, it is worth all men's while to know that
the purport of it is and remains noble and most real. Dryasdust,
looking merely at the surface, is greatly in error as to those
ancient Kings. William Conqueror, William Rufus or Redbeard,
Stephen Curthose himself, much more Henry Beauclerc and our brave
Plantagenet Henry: the life of these men was not a vulturous
Fighting; it was a valorous Governing,--to which occasionally
Fighting did, and alas must yet, though far seldomer now,
superadd itself as an accident, a distressing impedimental
adjunct. The fighting too was indispensable, for ascertaining
who had the might over whom, the right over whom. By much hard
fighting, as we once said, 'the unrealities, beaten into dust,
flew gradually off;' and left the plain reality and fact, "Thou
stronger than I; thou wiser than I; thou king, and subject I,"
in a somewhat clearer condition.

Truly we cannot enough admire, in those Abbot-Samson and William-
Conqueror times, the arrangement they had made of their Governing
Classes. Highly interesting to observe how the sincere insight,
on their part, into what did, of primary necessity, behove to be
accomplished, had led them to the way of accomplishing it, and in
the course of time to get it accomp