Talk to the many of religion, and they will put on a long face, confess that it is a thing of the greatest importance to all—­and go away and forget the whole.  Talk to them of education; they will readily acknowledge that it’s “a braw thing to be weel learned,” and begin a lamentation, which is only shorter than the lamentations of Jeremiah because they cannot make it as long, on the ignorance of the age in which they live; but they neither stir hand nor foot in the matter.  But speak to them of politics, and their excited countenances and kindling eye show in a moment how deeply they are interested.  Politics are therefore an important feature, and an almost indispensable element in such a work as mine.  Had it consisted solely of exhortations to industry and rules of economy, it would have been dismissed with an “Ou ay, it’s braw for him to crack that way:  but if he were whaur we are, ’deed he wad just hae to do as we do.”  But by mixing up the science with politics, and giving it an occasional political impetus, a different result may be reasonably expected.  In these days no man can be considered a patriot or friend of the poor, who is not also a politician.

It is amusing, by-the-bye, to see how the world changes its codes of respectability, and how, what is anathema in one generation, becomes trite orthodoxy in the next.  The political sins in the work were, that “my brother had attacked the corn-laws with some severity; and I have attempted to level a battery against that sort of servile homage which the poor pay to the rich!”

There is no use pursuing the story much farther.  They again save a little money, and need it; for the estate on which they have lived from childhood changing hands, they are, with their aged father, expelled from the dear old dog-kennel to find house-room where they can.  Why not?—­“it was not in the bond.”  The house did not belong to them; nothing of it, at least, which could be specified in any known lease.  True, there may have been associations:  but what associations can men be expected to cultivate on fourteenpence a-day?  So they must forth, with their two aged parents, and build with their own hands a new house elsewhere, having saved some thirty pounds from the sale of their writings.  The house, as we understand, stands to this day—­hereafter to become a sort of artisan’s caaba and pilgrim’s station, only second to Burns’s grave.  That, at least, it will become, whenever the meaning of the words “worth” and “worship” shall become rightly understood among us.

For what are these men, if they are not heroes and saints?  Not of the Popish sort, abject and effeminate, but of the true, human, evangelic sort, masculine and grand—­like the figures in Raffaelle’s Cartoons compared with those of Fra Bartolomeo.  Not from superstition, not from selfish prudence, but from devotion to their aged parents, and the righteous dread of dependence, they die voluntary celibates,