It is they who are small-eyed. Now, as heretofore, weaklings cannot rise high enough to take a bird’s-eye view of their own age, and calculate its dimensions.

The age, smaller than epochs to come, is a giant compared with the past, and full of mighty materials for any great pen in prose or verse.

My little friends aged nineteen and downward—­fourscore and upward—­who have been lending your ears to the stale little cant of every age, as chanted in this one by Buffo-Bombastes and other foaming-at-the-pen old women of both sexes—­take by way of antidote to all that poisonous, soul-withering drivel, ten honest words.

I say before heaven and earth that the man who could grasp the facts of this day and do an immortal writer’s duty by them, i.e., so paint them as a later age will be content to engrave them, would be the greatest writer ever lived.  Such is the force, weight and number of the grand topics that lie this day on the world’s face.  I say that he who has eyes to see may now see greater and far more poetic things than human eyes have seen since our Lord and his Apostles and his miracles left the earth.

It is very hard to write a good book or a good play, or to invent a good picture, and having invented paint it.  But it always was hard, except to those—­to whom it was impossible.  Bunglers will not mend matters by blackening the great canvases they can’t paint on, nor the impotent become males by detraction.

“Justice!”

When we write a story or sing a poem of the great nineteenth century, there is but one fear—­not that our theme will be beneath us, but we miles below it; that we shall lack the comprehensive vision a man must have from heaven to catch the historical, the poetic, the lasting features of the Titan events that stride so swiftly past IN THIS GIGANTIC AGE.

CHAPTER LVII.

THE life of George Fielding and Thomas Robinson for months could be composed in a few words:  tremendous work from sunrise to sundown, and on Sunday welcome rest, a quiet pipe, and a book.

At night they slept in a good tent, with Carlo at their feet and a little bag between them; this bag never left their sight; it went out to their work and in to sleep.

It is dinner-time; George and Tom are snatching a mouthful, and a few words over it.

“How much do you think we are, Tom?”

“Hush! don’t speak so loud, for Heaven’s sake;” he added in a whisper, “not a penny under seven hundred pounds’ worth.”

George sighed.

“It is slower work than I thought; but it is my fault, I am so unlucky.”

“Unlucky! and we have not been eight months at it.”

“But one party near us cleared four thousand pounds at a haul; one thousand pounds apiece—­ah!”

“And hundreds have only just been able to keep themselves.  Come, you must not grumble, we are high above the average.”