the street; the lads lounge near the public-houses, with which the neighbourhood abounds; the girls flaunt up and down, or peep and titter from the narrow archways leading into the courts with which the street is flanked. Two repulsive features strike one at once, the sickliness and the precocity of the great mass of this population. The English mechanic is for the most part no sturdy craftsman; his physical being is degraded by his attendance upon, his slavery to, the iron joints and sinews of the engine. The mother is no buxom dame; her sap of early youth was withered also by the side of the power-loom. The lad receives the wages, and adopts the habits (such as they are) of a man before his time; and the womanish appearance of the unwomanly girls is that, perhaps, from which one's sensitiveness recoils the most. Even the children are unchildlike, squalid, and dirty. . . . . Believe me, friend, if antipathy is too harsh a word, you may see that which will at all events dispose you to receive Charles Lamb's doctrine of imperfect sympathies. . . Still, if you mean to love, if you wish to love, there are better things in store for you; that is, after you have passed through much more of this kind of disappointment and vexation. For instance, if you have kept your ears open as well as your eyes, much, very much that is unlovely will have greeted them. I pass by the mere sounds, though all these little things tell, and especially the 'hoarse, discordant voices' of the females shock one's organs of hearing most painfully. It is the language, the words themselves, that are uttered, I allude to, rather than the tone in which they are uttered. Most foul words, assuredly, bandied about from mouth to mouth; but more foul still, as the observant writer of 'Sybil has not failed to remark, 'issuing from lips born to breathe words of sweetness.'

I might push all this much farther, and go into lengthy details, and speak but naked truths, which, as I have said, a mere walk through a dense district in some crowded town, will suffice to teach a superficial observer. But this outline of a sketch may suffice to show that, to arrive at loving the people, we must consent to view this love as a lesson to be learned, with some difficulty, some pain, and perhaps even some repugnance.

One point I must notice more specifically, because it is one on which misapprehension frequently prevails, especially with the young, generous, and inexperienced. It has not escaped the penetration of M. Michelet.

Perhaps, however, before proceeding any farther, it may be as well for me to express at once my opinion on this writer, and to disclaim any farther sympathy with him, than the sorrow one is bound to feel for the holder of deadly errors, which sorrow interferes not with the detestation of the errors themselves. At the same time there is in the book, of which the title stands at the

head of this paper, too much of bitter and undeniable truth, to allow us to meet him on the grounds only of sorrow, or even of hearty and entire disapproval. But to resume.

It is natural to think of the lower classes,' as they are called, (at least the opinion is very common,) that they have uncultivated minds. This want of culture, if it existed, would not be by any means a serious bar to have between the cultivated and uncultivated mind. On the contrary, as the genius of the sculptor may be said to yearn towards the shapeless block from which he shall create a master-piece, so the cultivated mind craves for the uncultivated, that it may exercise influence and action upon it. It is not so between the man who is not of the people and him that is: for take the latter even at his lowest state, and there is deep truth in what is said by Michelet.

'These people, who sometimes know not how to read, have nevertheless, in their own way, highly cultivated minds.

'Men who live together, ever in contact with one another, necessarily develop themselves by the mere fact thereof, as by the effect of natural warmth. They give each other an education—a bad one, if you please, but still an education.

"The simple sight of a great city, where without intending to learn any thing, we are instructed every instant, and where, in order to be acquainted with a thousand new things, it is sufficient to go into the street and walk with our eyes open, this sight, this city, be assured, is a school. They who live there do not live an instinctive natural life; they are men of cultivated minds, who observe more or less, and reflect well or ill. I find them often very subtle, viciously cunning. The effects of a refined culture are there but too plainly visible.'

So much for these people who sometimes know not how to read,' and the degree of cultivation to which their mind may, and naturally does attain; but they are only one class. There is another, bearing already a great proportion to the whole; I mean the class (daily increasing) of men who, to this spontaneous culture, if I may so call it, add that of partial and even advanced instruction. Men who can and do read, and find under their hands a whole body of debased literature to complete their depravation. The number of libraries to be met with in the poorest and most populous district, as well as the nature of the works displayed in their windows, must strike the most superficial observer, and give sufficient evidence of the wide spread of a certain kind of education in the neighbourhood where they may chance to be placed.

Nothing, perhaps, can be more unfavourable to the formation and development of sympathy between men, than to have received what may be called antagonistic educations. Natural differences are far from checking such growth of sympathy; but differences in received modes of thought, in the artificial frame and mould of

the character and intellect, these estrange men most effectually from one another; so much so, indeed, that it is not uncommon to find, that where the substance of opinion, or the like, is intrinsically the same, men are yet kept irrevocably separated by the acquired formal differences with which the inner thought has been encrusted. Strict account must be kept of the truth, and due allowances made in consequence of it, in conning over the task proposed. For, indeed, this truth is deep-rooted, and it spreads far you will find it pursue you in dealing with a large class even of children among the people; with the children, I mean, of the very poor. Hear what Charles Lamb says of them, a man than whom few have ever been observers more quick or

more accurate.

'The children of the very poor have no young times. It makes the very heart bleed to overhear the casual street-talk between a poor woman and her little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a condition rather above the squalid beings which we have been contemplating. It is not of toys, of nursery books, of summer holidays (fitting that age,) of the promised sight or play, of praised sufficiency at school. It is of mangling and clearstarching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes! The questions of the child, that should be the very outpourings of curiosity in idleness, are marked with forecast and melancholy providence. It has come to be a woman before it was a child. It has learned to go to market; it chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it murmurs; it is knowing, acute, sharpened-it never prattles.'

And if this is true of those on whom he was wont to exercise his powers of observation, the poor children of the metropolis, much truer is it of the children in those vast markets of childlabour, the manufacturing towns of England. So much truer, that the occasional bursts of uncontrolled nature in the playground of a factory-school, seem almost misplaced and paradoxical.

I say, then, that it is not mere absence of cultivation, more than the presence of a high degree, or a precocious degree, of a certain melancholy cultivation, that estranges us, such as we are, from the people, or at least from a large class of them; but when I say this, I do not mean to lose sight entirely of the natural antipathy between the rude and the polished: for it exists undeniably, and is no slight element in those difficulties of loving that I have spoken of. Perhaps, indeed, when I talked of the yearning of the cultivated towards the uncultivated, I should have added that this will exist only where to the cultivation of a mind is joined a creative power, having an innate sense of itself; and then there would be less chance of the two doctrines clashing. The mind which is merely refined, shrinks wholly and decidedly from its uncouth, rude, and repulsive opposite. Hands that are delicate will not mould statues out of dirty clay, unless they are

guided by heads that know the secret of the Promethean fire, and foresee what the lump of clay shall be when it can move and breathe.

This might be illustrated in many ways. It may suffice to do so by considering the female character among the working people, and the probable way in which it would be dealt with by the merely, and by the more than refined. I select a passage from the Claims of Labour,' p. 144; it runs thus:

In the report on the condition of children and young persons employed in mines and manufactures, there is some remarkable evidence given by a man who had himself risen from the state of life which he describes. It leads us to perceive the great good which any improvement in the domestic accomplishments of the woman might be expected to produce. He says,

Children during their childhood toil throughout the day, acquiring not the least domestic instruction to fit them for wives and mothers. Ĭ will mention one instance, and this applies to the general condition of females doomed to, and brought up amongst, shop-work. My mother worked in a manufactory from a very early age. She was clever and industrious; and, moreover,* she had the reputation of being virtuous. She was regarded as an excellent match for a working man. She was married early. She became the mother of eleven children: I am the eldest. To the best of her ability she performed the important duties of a wife and a mother. She was lamentably deficient in domestic knowledge; in that most important of all human instruction, how to make the house and the fireside to possess a charm for her husband and children, she had never received one single lesson. She had children apace. As she recovered from her lying-in, so she went to work, the babe being brought to her at stated times to receive nourishment. As the family increased, so anything like comfort disappeared altogether. The power to make home cheerful and comfortable was never given to her. She knew not the value of cherishing in my father's mind a love of domestic objects. Not one moment's happiness did I ever see under my father's roof. All this dismal state of things I can distinctly trace to the entire and perfect absence of all training and instruction to my mother. He became intemperate, and his intemperance made her necessitous. She made many efforts to abstain from shop-work; but her pecuniary necessities forced her back into the shop. The family was large, and every moment was required at home. I have known her, after the close of a hard day's work, sit up nearly all night for several nights together, washing and mending of clothes. My father could have no comfort here. These domestic obligations, which in a well-regulated house (even in that of a working man, where there are prudence and good management) would be done so as not to annoy the husband, to my father were a source of annoyance; and he, from an ignorant and mistaken notion, sought comfort in an alehouse. My mother's ignorance of household duties; my father's consequent irritability and intemperance; the frightful poverty; the constant quarrelling;

* Mark that moreover,' it has its meaning, and bears upon mine.

the pernicious example to my brothers and sisters; the bad effect upon the future conduct of my brothers; one and all of us being forced out to work so young that our feeble earnings would produce only a shilling a week; cold and hunger, and the innumerable sufferings of my childhood, crowd upon my mind and overpower me. They keep alive a deep anxiety for the emancipation of the thousands of families in this great town and neighbourhood, who are in a similar state of horrible misery. My own experience tells me that the instruction of the females in the work of a house, in teaching them to produce cheerfulness and comfort at the fire-side, would prevent a great amount of misery and crime. There would be fewer drunken husbands and disobedient children. As a working man, within my own observation female education is disgracefully neglected. I attach more importance to it than to anything else.'

Only imagine an unreal would-be lover of the people introduced to such a family in one of his dilettante moods! Can a greater contrast be well imagined than between the realities and his imaginings of the mechanic's home? Let one see this mother of a poverty-stricken and disunited family, with the language and manner of the workshop, and her small remains of comeliness disfigured, it may be, by the soiled and greasy apron of the factory-let him be all unwitting, as needs he must be, of her virtue, unsullied amidst the contamination, which has too probably surrounded her from youth upwards; of her natural ability, of her heroic night struggles to keep her little ones from filth and nakedness: what judgment, think we, would he pass on this devoted being?-and yet what judgment could one well pass from that which meets the eye? Must it not require time and application and painful effort to learn to value such a one at her real worth and will not the stomach often rise at the task, unless the heart be fully bent upon it?

It is a fact, that even the season of love, which endows women, for the most part, with more than wonted feminine grace and delicacy, brings little or none of its softening influence to bear upon the unwomanly womanish' girl of our great towns: there is a want of higher sentiment even here, which is most unattractive for any person, and must be utterly repulsive to sentimental speculators.

But as I have said once before, why push the argument farther? Enough has been said to prove that some earnestness is wanted to carry us through.

If that earnestness does exist, if it be patiently and courageously set upon its generous aim, doubtless, in spite of all I have mentioned, and of much more that I leave wholly unnoticed, doubtless it will be able to find amongst the people much which it may cling to with the warmth of a real affection, resting-places from which deep sympathy may never be dislodged. The cha

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