tes
from Madeira, "is not dinner-parties and small talk, nor even croquet
and dancing." There is a touch of exaggeration in phrases like these
which need not blind us to the depth and reality of the feeling which
they imperfectly express, a feeling which prompted the question which
embodies the spirit of all these earlier letters,--the question, "What
is my work?"

The answer to this question was found both within and without the
questioner. Those who were young in the weary days of Palmerstonian rule
will remember the disgust at purely political life which was produced by
the bureaucratic inaction of the time, and we can hardly wonder that,
like many of the finer minds among his contemporaries, Edward Denison
turned from the political field which was naturally open to him to the
field of social effort. His tendency in this direction was aided, no
doubt, partly by the intensity of this religious feeling and of his
consciousness of the duty he owed to the poor, and partly by that closer
sympathy with the physical suffering around us which is one of the most
encouraging characteristics of the day. Even in the midst of his
outburst of delight at a hard frost ("I like," he says, "the bright
sunshine that generally accompanies it, the silver landscape, and the
ringing distinctness of sounds in the frozen air"), we see him haunted
by a sense of the way in which his pleasure contrasts with the winter
misery of the poor. "I would rather give up all the pleasures of the
frost than indulge them, poisoned as they are by the misery of so many
of our brothers. What a monstrous thing it is that in the richest
country in the world large masses of the population should be condemned
annually to starvation and death!" It is easy to utter protests like
these in the spirit of a mere sentimentalist; it is less easy to carry
them out into practical effort, as Edward Denison resolved to do. After
an unsatisfactory attempt to act as Almoner for the Society for the
Relief of Distress, he resolved to fix himself personally in the
East-end of London, and study the great problem of pauperism face to
face.

His resolve sprang from no fit of transient enthusiasm, but from a sober
conviction of the need of such a step. "There are hardly any residents
in the East rich enough to give much money, or with enough leisure to
give much time," he says. "This is the evil. Even the best disposed in
the West don't like coming so far off, and, indeed, few have