ere so much was done, we are
bound to conceive others at work as well as he, it seems to follow that
the exemplar outstripping them vastly must have profited by situation at
the start, which is a lucky accident; and an accident is an indigestible
lump in a moral tale, real though the story be. It was not mentioned in
the popular books; nor did those worthy guides to the pursuit of wealth
contain any reminder of old John Mattock's dependence upon the conjoint
labour of his fellows to push him to his elevation. As little did they
think of foretelling a day, generations hence, when the empty heirs
of his fellows might prefer a modest claim (confused in statement) to
compensation against the estate he bequeathed: for such prophecy as that
would have hinted at a tenderness for the mass to the detriment of the
individual, and such tenderness as that is an element of our religion,
not the drift of our teaching.

He grumbled at the heavy taxation of his estate during life: yearly this
oppressed old man paid thousands of pounds to the Government. It was
poor encouragement to shoulder and elbow your way from a hovel to a
mansion!

He paid the money, dying sour; a splendid example of energy on the road,
a forbidding one at the terminus. And here the moral of the popular
books turned aside from him to snatch at humanity for an instance of our
frailness and dealt in portentous shadows:--we are, it should be known,
not the great creatures we assume ourselves to be. Six months before his
death he appeared in the garb of a navvy, humbly soliciting employment
at his own house-door. There he appealed to the white calves of his
footmen for a day's work, upon the plea that he had never been a
democrat.

The scene had been described with humanely-moralising pathos in the
various books of stories of Men who have come to Fortune, and it had
for a length of seasons an annual position in the foremost rank (on the
line, facing the door) in our exhibition of the chosen artists, where,
as our popular words should do, it struck the spectator's eye and his
brain simultaneously with pugilistic force: a reference to the picture
in the catalogue furnishing a recapitulation of the incident. 'I've
worked a good bit in my time, gentlemen, and I baint done yet':--SEE
PROFESSOR SUMMIT'S 'MEN WHO HAVE COME TO FORTUNE.' There is, we perceive
at a glance, a contrast in the bowed master of the Mansion applying
to his menials for a day's work at the rate of p