? The man who likes what you like, belongs to
the same class with you, I think. Inevitably so. You may put him to
other work if you choose; but, by the condition you have brought him
into, he will dislike the other work as much as you would yourself. You
get hold of a scavenger, or a costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate
Calendar for literature, and "Pop goes the Weasel" for music. You think
you can make him like Dante and Beethoven? I wish you joy of your
lessons; but if you do, you have made a gentleman of him:--he won't like
to go back to his costermongering.'

And so completely and unexceptionally is this so, that, if I had time
to-night, I could show you that a nation cannot be affected by any vice,
or weakness, without expressing it, legibly, and for ever, either in bad
art, or by want of art; and that there is no national virtue, small or
great, which is not manifestly expressed in all the art which
circumstances enable the people possessing that virtue to produce. Take,
for instance, your great English virtue of enduring and patient courage.
You have at present in England only one art of any consequence--that is,
iron-working. You know thoroughly well how to cast and hammer iron. Now,
do you think in those masses of lava which you build volcanic cones to
melt, and which you forge at the mouths of the Infernos you have
created; do you think, on those iron plates, your courage and endurance
are not written for ever--not merely with an iron pen, but on iron
parchment? And take also your great English vice--European vice--vice of
all the world--vice of all other worlds that roll or shine in heaven,
bearing with them yet the atmosphere of hell--the vice of jealousy,
which brings competition into your commerce, treachery into your
councils, and dishonour into your wars--that vice which has rendered for
you, and for your next neighbouring nation, the daily occupations of
existence no longer possible, but with the mail upon your breasts and
the sword loose in its sheath; so that, at last, you have realised for
all the multitudes of the two great peoples who lead the so-called
civilisation of the earth,--you have realised for them all, I say, in
person and in policy, what was once true only of the rough Border riders
of your Cheviot hills--

'They carved at the meal
With gloves of steel,
And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd;--

do you think that this national s