rom whose casement you see the
beggar's rags hang to dry, or rather to crumble in the reeking and
filthy air; farther on, within those walls which, black and heavy as the
hearts they hide, close our miserable prospect,--there, even there, in
the mildewed dungeon, in the felon's cell, on the very scaffold's self,
Ambition hugs her own hope or scowls upon her own despair. Yes! the
inmates of those walls had their perilous game of honour, their 'hazard
of the die,' in which vice was triumph and infamy success. We do but
share their passion, though we direct it to a better object."

Pausing for a moment, as his thoughts flowed into a somewhat different
channel of his character, Warner continued, "We have now caught a
glimpse of the two great divisions of mankind; they who riot in palaces,
and they who make mirth hideous in rags and hovels: own that it is but
a poor survey in either. Can we be contemptible with these or loathsome
with those? Or rather have we not a nobler spark within us, which
we have but to fan into a flame that shall burn forever, when these
miserable meteors sink into the corruption from which they rise?"

"But," observed Clarence, "these are the two extremes; the pinnacle of
civilization, too worn and bare for any more noble and vigorous fruit,
and the base upon which the cloud descends in rain and storm. Look to
the central portion of society; there the soil is more genial, and its
produce more rich."

"Is it so, in truth?" answered Warner; "pardon me, I believe not: the
middling classes are as human as the rest. There is the region, the
heart, of Avarice,--systematized, spreading, rotting, the very fungus
and leprosy of social states; suspicion, craft, hypocrisy, servility to
the great, oppression to the low, the waxlike mimicry of courtly vices,
the hardness of flint to humble woes; thought, feeling, the faculties
and impulses of man, all ulcered into one great canker, Gain,--these
make the general character of the middling class, the unleavened mass of
that mediocrity which it has been the wisdom of the shallow to applaud.
Pah! we too are of this class, this potter's earth, this paltry mixture
of mud and stone; but we, my friend, we will knead gold into our clay."

"But look," said Clarence, pointing to the group before them, "look, yon
wretched mother, whose voice an instant ago uttered the coarsest accents
of maudlin and intoxicated prostitution, is now fostering her infant,
with a fondness sta