it; to cringe and fawn upon the people that have blue blood is manifestly futile, since the peculiarity is not communicable, but it is hoped that, by being shaken up in the same social bag with millionaires, something may be attained by what is technically called the ‘sweating’ process.  So far as I have observed, however, the results are small, while the operation is to the last degree disagreeable.

What is very significant of this new sort of golden age is that a literature of its own has arisen, though of an anomalous kind.  It is presided over by a sort of male Miss Kilmansegge, who is also a model of propriety.  It is as though the dragon that guarded the apples of Hesperides should be a dragon of virtue.  Under the pretence of extolling prudence and perseverance, he paints money-making as the highest good, and calls it thrift; and the popularity of this class of book is enormous.  The heroes are all ‘self-made’ men who come to town with that proverbial half-crown which has the faculty of accumulation that used to be confined to snowballs.  Like the daughters of the horse-leech, their cry is ‘Give, give,’ only instead of blood they want money; and I need hardly say they get it from other people’s pockets.  Love and friendship are names that have lost their meaning, if they ever had any, with these gentry.  They remind one of the miser of old who could not hear a large sum of money mentioned without an acceleration of the action of the heart; and perhaps that is the use of their hearts, which, otherwise, like that of the spleen in other people, must be only a subject of vague conjecture.  They live abhorred and die respected; leaving all their heaped-up wealth to some charitable institution, the secretary of which levants with it eventually to the United States.

This last catastrophe, however, is not mentioned in these biographies, the subjects of which are held up as patterns of wisdom and prudence for the rising generation.  I shall have left the Midway Inn, thank Heaven, for a residence of smaller dimensions, before it has grown up.  Conceive an England inhabited by self-made men!

Has it ever struck you how gloomy is the poetry of the present day?  This is not perhaps of very much consequence, since everybody has a great deal too much to do to permit them to read it; but how full of sighs, and groans, and passionate bewailings it is!  And also how deuced difficult!  It is almost as inarticulate as an AEolian harp, and quite as melancholy.  There are one or two exceptions, of course, as in the case of Mr. Calverley and Mr. Locker; but even the latter is careful to insist upon the fact that, like those who have gone before us, we must all quit Piccadilly.  ‘At present,’ as dear Charles Lamb writes, ‘we have the advantage of them;’ but there is no one to remind us of that now, nor is it, as I have said, the general opinion that it is an advantage.