But Elsley became not only a more idle, but a more morose man.  He began to feel the evils of solitude.  There was no one near with whom he could hold rational converse, save an antiquarian parson or two; and parsons were not to his taste.  So, never measuring his wits against those of his peers, and despising the few men whom he met as inferior to himself, he grew more and more wrapt up in his own thoughts and his own tastes.  His own poems, even to the slightest turn of expression, became more and more important to him.  He grew more jealous of criticism, more confident in his own little theories, about this and that, more careless of the opinion of his fellowmen, and, as a certain consequence, more unable to bear the little crosses and contradictions of daily life; and as Lucia, having brought one and another child safely into the world, settled down into motherhood, he became less and less attentive to her, and more and more attentive to that self which was fast becoming the centre of his universe.

True, there were excuses for him; for whom are there none?  He was poor and struggling; and it is much more difficult (as Becky Sharp, I think, pathetically observes) to be good when one is poor than when one is rich.  It is (and all rich people should consider the fact) much more easy, if not to go to heaven, at least to think one is going thither, on three thousand a year, than on three hundred.  Not only is respectability more easy, as is proved by the broad fact that it is the poor people who fill the gaols, and not the rich ones:  but virtue, and religion—­of the popular sort.  It is undeniably more easy to be resigned to the will of Heaven, when that will seems tending just as we would have it; much more easy to have faith in the goodness of Providence, when that goodness seems safe in one’s pocket in the form of bank-notes; and to believe that one’s children are under the protection of Omnipotence, when one can hire for them in half an hour the best medical advice in London.  One need only look into one’s own heart to understand the disciples’ astonishment at the news, that “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

“Who then can be saved?” asked they, being poor men, accustomed to see the wealthy Pharisees in possession of “the highest religious privileges, and means of grace.”  Who, indeed, if not the rich?  If the noblemen, and the bankers, and the dowagers, and the young ladies who go to church, and read good books, and have been supplied from youth with the very best religious articles which money can procure, and have time for all manner of good works, and give their hundreds to charities, and head reformatory movements, and build churches, and work altar-cloths, and can taste all the preachers and father-confessors round London, one after another, as you would taste wines, till they find the spiritual panacea which exactly suits their complaint—­if they are not sure of salvation, who can be saved?