Now, it is a postulate, to strengthen all poor commoners, that not even in comparison with the highest need we be small unless we yield to think it of ourselves.  Do but stretch a hand to the touch of earth in you, and you spring upon combative manhood again, from the basis where all are equal.  Humanity’s historians, however, tell us, that the exhilaration bringing us consciousness of a stature, is gas which too frequently has to be administered.  Certes the cocks among men do not require the process; they get it off the sight of the sun arising or a simple hen submissive:  but we have our hibernating bears among men, our yoked oxen, cab horses, beaten dogs; we have on large patches of these Islands, a Saxon population, much wanting assistance, if they are not to feel themselves beaten, driven, caught by the neck, yoked and heavyheaded.  Blest, then, is he who gives them a sense of the pride of standing on legs.  Beer, ordinarily their solitary helper beneath the iron canopy of wealth, is known to them as a bitter usurer; it knocks them flat in their persons and their fortunes, for the short spell of recreative exaltation.  They send up their rough glory round the name of the gentleman—­a stranger, but their friend:  and never is friend to be thought of as a stranger—­who manages to get the holiday for Wrensham and thereabout, that they may hurl away for one jolly day the old hat of a doddered humbleness, and trip to the strains of the internal music he has unwound.

Says he:  Is it a Charity Concert?  Charity begins at home, says he:  and if I welcome you gentry on behalf of the poor of London, why, it follows you grant me the right to make a beginning with the poor of our parts down here.  He puts it so, no master nor mistress neither could refuse him.  Why, the workmen at his house were nigh pitching the contractors all sprawling on a strike, and Mr. Radnor takes train, harangues ’em and rubs ’em smooth; ten minutes by the clock, they say; and return train to his business in town; by reason of good sense and feeling, it was; poor men don’t ask for more.  A working man, all the world over, asks but justice and a little relaxation—­just a collar of fat to his lean.

Mr. Caddis, M.P., pursuing the riddle of popularity, which irritated and repelled as constantly as it attracted him, would have come nearer to an instructive presentment of it, by listening to these plain fellows, than he was in the line of equipages, at a later hour of the day.  The remarks of the comfortably cushioned and wheeled, though they be eulogistic to extravagance, are vapourish when we court them for nourishment; substantially, they are bones to the cynical.  He heard enumerations of Mr. Radnor’s riches, eclipsing his own past compute.  A merchant, a holder of mines, Director of a mighty Bank, projector of running rails, a princely millionaire, and determined to be popular—­what was the aim of the man?  It is the curse of modern times, that we never can