One brute that could not spell chicory to save himself from the gallows cleared two thousand pounds a month by selling it and hot water at a pinch a cup.  Thus ran his announcement, “Cofy allus rady.”

Meantime Trigonometry was frying steaks and on Sunday blacking boots.

After a while lucky diggers returned to the towns clogged with gold, and lusting and panting for pleasure.

They hired carriages and sweethearts, and paraded the streets all day, crying, “We be the hairy-stocracy, now!!”

The shopkeepers bowed down and did them homage.

Even here Nature had her say.  The sexes came out—­the men sat in the carriages in their dirty fustian and their checkered shirts and no jacket; their inamoritas beside them glittered in silk and satin.  And some fiend told these poor women it was genteel to be short-sighted; so they all bought gold spy-glasses, and spied without intermission.

Then the old colonial aristocracy, who had been born in broadcloth and silk, and unlike the new had not been transported, but only their papas and mammas, were driven to despair; but at last they hit upon a remedy.  They would be distinguished by hook or by crook, and the only way left now was always to go on foot.  So they walked the pavement—­wet or dry, nothing could induce them to enter the door of a carriage.  Item:  they gave up being shortsighted; the few who for reasons distinct from fashion could not resign the habit concealed it, as if it was a defect instead of a beauty.

This struggle of classes in the towns, with its hundred and one incidents, was an excellent theme for satire of the highest class.  How has it escaped? is it that even Satire, low and easy art, is not so low and easy as Detraction?  But these are the outskirts of a great theme.  The theme itself belonged, not to little satire, but to great epic.

In the sudden return of a society far more complex, artificial and conventional than Pericles ever dreamed of, to elements more primitive than Homer had to deal with; in this, with its novelty, and nature, and strange contrasts,

In the old barbaric force and native color of the passions, as they burst out undisguised around the gold,

In the hundred and one personal combats and trials of cunning,

In a desert peopled, and cities thinned by the magic of cupidity,

In a huge army collected in ten thousand tents, not as heretofore by one man’s constraining will, but each human unit spurred into the crowd by his own heart,

In “the siege of Gold,” defended stoutly by Rock and Disease,

In the world-wide effect of the discovery, the peopling of the earth at last according to Heaven’s long-published and resisted design,

Fate offered poetry a theme broad and high, yet piquant, and various as the dolphin and the rainbow.