As I was thinking over this, in walking up Fleet Street the other day, my eye caught the title of a book standing open in a bookseller’s window.  It was—­“On the necessity of the diffusion of taste among all classes.”  “Ah,” I thought to myself, “my classifying friend, when you have diffused your taste, where will your classes be?  The man who likes what you like, belongs to the same class with you, I think.  Inevitably so.  You may put him to other work if you choose; but, by the condition you have brought him into, he will dislike the other work as much as you would yourself.  You get hold of a scavenger or a costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate Calendar for literature, and ‘Pop goes the Weasel’ for music.  You think you can make him like Dante and Beethoven?  I wish you joy of your lessons; but if you do, you have made a gentleman of him:—­he won’t like to go back to his coster-mongering.”

And so completely and unexceptionally is this so, that, if I had time to-night, I could show you that a nation cannot be affected by any vice, or weakness, without expressing it, legibly, and for ever, either in bad art, or by want of art; and that there is no national virtue, small or great, which is not manifestly expressed in all the art which circumstances enable the people possessing that virtue to produce.  Take, for instance, your great English virtue of enduring and patient courage.  You have at present in England only one art of any consequence—­that is, iron-working.  You know thoroughly well how to cast and hammer iron.  Now, do you think, in those masses of lava which you build volcanic cones to melt, and which you forge at the mouths of the Infernos you have created; do you think, on those iron plates, your courage and endurance are not written for ever,—­not merely with an iron pen, but on iron parchment?  And take also your great English vice—­European vice—­vice of all the world—­vice of all other worlds that roll or shine in heaven, bearing with them yet the atmosphere of hell—­the vice of jealousy, which brings competition into your commerce, treachery into your councils, and dishonour into your wars—­that vice which has rendered for you, and for your next neighbouring nation, the daily occupations of existence no longer possible, but with the mail upon your breasts and the sword loose in its sheath; so that at last, you have realized for all the multitudes of the two great peoples who lead the so-called civilization of the earth,—­you have realized for them all, I say, in person and in policy, what was once true only of the rough Border riders of your Cheviot hills—­

    They carved at the meal
    With gloves of steel,

And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr’d;[204] do you think that this national shame and dastardliness of heart are not written as legibly on every rivet of your iron armour as the strength of the right hands that forged it?