th Clarence, when the evening darkened, to snatch a brief
respite of exercise and air. Often, along the lighted and populous
streets, would the two young and unfriended competitors for this world's
high places roam with the various crowd, moralizing as they went or
holding dim conjecture upon their destinies to be. And often would they
linger beneath the portico of some house where, "haunted with great
resort," Pleasure and Pomp held their nightly revels, to listen to the
music that, through the open windows, stole over the rare exotics with
which wealth mimics the southern scents, and floated, mellowing by
distance, along the unworthy streets; and while they stood together,
silent and each feeding upon separate thoughts, the artist's pale
lip would curl with scorn, as he heard the laugh and the sounds of a
frivolous and hollow mirth ring from the crowd within, and startle the
air from the silver spell which music had laid upon it. "These," would
he say to Clarence, "these are the dupes of the same fever as ourselves:
like us, they strive and toil and vex their little lives for a
distinction from their race. Ambition comes to them, as to all: but they
throw for a different prize than we do; theirs is the honour of a day,
ours is immortality; yet they take the same labour and are consumed by
the same care. And, fools that they are, with their gilded names and
their gaudy trappings, they would shrink in disdain from that comparison
with us which we, with a juster fastidiousness, blush at this moment to
acknowledge."

From these scenes they would rove on, and, both delighting in contrast,
enter some squalid and obscure quarter of the city. There, one night,
quiet observers of their kind, they paused beside a group congregated
together by some common cause of obscene merriment or unholy
fellowship--a group on which low vice had set her sordid and hideous
stamp--to gaze and draw strange humours or a motley moral from that
depth and ferment of human nature into whose sink the thousand streams
of civilization had poured their dregs and offal.

"You survey these," said the painter, marking each with the curious eye
of his profession: "they are a base horde, it is true; but they have
their thirst of fame, their aspirations even in the abyss of crime or
the loathsomeness of famished want. Down in yon cellar, where a farthing
rushlight glimmers upon haggard cheeks, distorted with the idiotcy
of drink; there, in that foul attic, f