branches to temper the wind to the shorn lamb. And when none other can plead for forsaken humanity, he, with the authority of omnipotent genius knocks at the portals of greatness with a firmness that will not be said nay, and tells, with an eloquence that cannot be denied, "the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes." God bless that good man! the God who stilleth the cry of the young raven, and who visiteth, in their affliction, the fatherless and the widow. Listen to him; hear his words of truth and soberness; learn of one who hath been taught by him who was meek and lowly of heart. "Now, when he thought how regularly things went on from day to day in the same unvarying round; how youth and beauty died, and ugly, griping age lived tottering on; how crafty avarice grew rich, and manly honest hearts were poor and sad; how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many those who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down at night, and lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon race, and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them, or the energies of one single man directed to their aid; how in seeking, not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched and inadequate subsistence, there were women and children in that one town, divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to drive most criminal and dreadful trades; how ignorance was punished and never taught; how jail doors gaped and gallows loomed for thousands urged towards them by circumstances darkly curtaining their very cradles' heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest bread, and lived in peace; how many died in soul, and had no chance of life; how many, who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they would, turned haughtily from the crushed and stricken wretch who could scarce do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he or she done well, than even they, had they done ill; how much injustice, and misery, and wrong there was, and yet how the world rolled on from year to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or redress it; when he thought of all this, and selected from the mass the one slight cause on which his thoughts were bent, he felt indeed that there was little ground for hope, and little cause or reason why it should not form an atom in the huge aggregate of distress and sorrow, and add one small and unimportant unit to swell the great amount. 'Take physic, pomp! Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, Can the great ones of the earth calmly read but this one passage out of the thousand stirring appeals which everywhere meet them in these extraordinary volumes on behalf of the little ones of this weary world, without some misgivings that all is not right? Is there not something in their feeble but plaintive cry, as here supported with the word of power; is there not, we say, something in it (like the pressure of an infant's little hand round the finger of the strong man), that sometimes spoils a fine dinner to those whose hearts are not just yet a piece of shrivelled parchment? Think, peer, for a brief moment; we say, think. As you read such a picture as this, do the springs of your carriage not feel more uneasy under you as you call to mind that it is built upon the morsel of the beggar? Are there no compunctious visitings of nature that " steal on you ere you are aware," when you feel that the little shivering, street-abandoned wretch that gets his loaf by selling small-ware, is robbed of the half of it to put diamonds in your shoe-buckles? Is it possible that you can see that skeleton, with the keen, sharpened, abject features of starvation, with two naked children and the famishing antic at her breast, whose unnatural, hideous caricature of humanity hardly admits it a place in the classification of the infancy of man, cowering at the foot of some deserted lane to eat their first meal for two days; can it be that you can see this, and forget that even such beings as these pay to you, by a law made by yourself for yourself, the half of every penny that they beg from some kind being, but a little way less poor than themselves? VOL. II. C See that beautiful young duchess, so encompassed with the odour of refined aristocracy, that as she passes us like the flitting of a cloud, the very sense aches at her; she seems to disdain the very ground she walks upon, and, like the sensitive plant, to shudder and contract into herself at the very contiguity of the poor; although, mayhap, she has sometimes heard, in her crimson velvet pew, that, eighteen hundred years ago, some one declared them to be her brethren and sisters. She will fly the very sight of these horrid wretches, and "swear a pretty oath by yea and nay," because her coachman did not drive the other way, that her eyes might not be offended by the very look of these terrible creatures. A word in your ear, madam; ay, in your ivory-turned ear, where hang those diamond drops. Why, these sparkling pendants were bought with money robbed from those same beggars. That glittering neeklace, "which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore;" believe it or not, is wrung from the hard hands of starving peasants, and every ring on those taper fingers has famished a family of your fellow-creatures. |