times of ours, with what enormous difficulty,
next-door to impossibility! For the times are really strange;
of a complexity intricate with all the new width of the
ever-widening world; times here of half-frantic velocity of
impetus, there of the deadest-looking stillness and paralysis;
times definable as shewing two qualities, Dilettantism and
Mammonism;--most intricate obstructed times! Nay, if there
were not a Heaven's radiance of justice, prophetic, clearly
of Heaven, discernible behind all these confused worldwide
entanglements, of Landlord interests, Manufacturing interests,
Tory-Whig interests, and who knows what other interests,
expediencies, vested interests, established possessions,
inveterate Dilettantisms, Midas-eared Mammonisms,--it would
seem to everyone a flat impossibility, which all wise men
might as well at once abandon. If you do not know eternal
justice from momentary Expediency, and understand in your
heart of hearts how justice, radiant, beneficent, as the
all-victorious Light-element, is also in essence, if need be,
an all-victorious _Fire_-element, and melts all manner of vested
interests, and the hardest iron cannon, as if they were soft wax,
and does ever in the long-run rule and reign, and allows nothing
else to rule and reign,--you also would talk of impossibility!
But it is only difficult, it is not impossible. Possible? It
is, with whatever difficulty, very clearly inevitable.

Fair day's-wages for fair-day's-work! exclaims a sarcastic man;
alas, in what corner of this Planet, since Adam first awoke on
it, was that ever realised? The day's-wages of John Milton's
day's-work, named _Paradise Lost_ and _Milton's Works,_ were Ten
Pounds paid by instalments, and a rather close escape from death
on the gallows. Consider that: it is no rhetorical flourish;
it is an authentic, altogether quiet fact,--emblematic, quietly
documentary of a whole world of such, ever since human history
began. Oliver Cromwell quitted his farming; undertook a
Hercules' Labour and lifelong wrestle with that Lernean
Hydracoil, wide as England, hissing heaven-high through its
thousand crowned, coroneted, shovel-hatted quackheads; and he
did wrestle with it, the truest and terriblest wrestle I have
heard of; and he wrestled it, and mowed and cut it down a good
many stages, so that its hissing is ever since pitiful in
comparison, and one can walk abroad in comparative peace from
it;--and his wages, as I unders