in Lancashire, in the parts about St. Helens, and who has lately been transferred to the west of Ireland, writes to me that he finds with astonishment, how 'even in the farthest ultima Thule of the west, amongst literally the most abjectly poverty-stricken cottiers, life appears to be more enjoyed than by a Lancashire factory-hand and family who are in the receipt of five pounds a week, father, mother, and children together, from the mill.' He writes that he finds 'all the country people here so full of courtesy and graciousness!' That is just why our civilisation has no attractions for them. So far as it is possessed by any great body in our own community, and capable of being imparted to any great body in another community, our civilisation has no courtesy and graciousness, it has no enjoyment of life, it has the curse of hardness upon it.

The penalty nature makes us pay for hardness is dulness. If we are hard, our life becomes dull and dismal. Our hardness grows at last weary of itself. In Ireland, where we have been so hard, this has been strikingly exemplified. Again and again, upon the English conqueror in his hardness and harshness, the ways and nature of the downtrodden, hated, despised Irish, came to exercise a strange, an irresistible magnetism. Is it possible,' asks Eudoxus, in Spenser's View of the State of Ireland, 'is it possible

that an Englishman, brought up in such sweet civility as England affords, should find such liking in that barbarous rudeness that he should forget his own nature and forgo his own nation?' And Spenser, speaking under the name of Irenæus, answers that unhappily it did, indeed, often happen so. The Protestant Archbishop Boulter tells us, in like manner, that under the iron sway of the penal laws against Popery, and in the time of their severest exercise, the conversions from Protestantism to Popery were nevertheless a good deal more numerous than the conversions from Popery to Protestantism. Such, I say, is nature's penalty upon hardness. Hardness grows irksome to its very own self, it ends by wearying those who have it. If our hardness is capable of wearying ourselves, can we wonder that a civilisation stamped with it has no attractions for the Irish; that Murdstone, the product of Salem House and of Mr. Creakle, is a type of humanity which repels them, and that they do not at all wish to be like him?

But in Murdstone we see English middle-class civilisation by its severe and serious side only. That civilisation has undoubtedly also its gayer and lighter side. And this gayer and lighter side, as well as the other, we shall find, wonderful to relate, in that all-containing treasure-house of ours, the History of David Copperfield.

Mr. Quinion, with his gaiety, his claff, his rough coat, his incessant smoking, his brandy and water, is the jovial, genial man of our middle-class civilisation, prepared by Salem House and Mr. Creakle, as Mr. Murdstone is its severe man. Quinion, we are told in our History, was the manager of Murdstone's business, and he is truly his pendant. He is the answer of our middle-class civilisation to the demand in man for beauty and enjoyment, as Murdstone is its answer to the demand for temper and manners. But to a quick, sentimental race, Quinion can be hardly more attractive than Murdstone. Quinion produces our towns considered as seats of pleasure, as Murdstone produces them considered as seats of business and religion. As it is Murdstone, the serious man, whose view of life and demands on life have made our Hell-holes, as Cobbett calls our manufacturing towns, have made the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion, and the refusal to let Irish Catholics have schools and universities suited to them because their religion is a lie and heathenish superstition, so it is Quinion, the jovial man, whose view of life and demands on it have made our popular songs, comedy, art, pleasure, -made the City Companies and their feasts, made the London streets, made the Griffin. Nay, Quinion has been busy in Dublin too, for have we not conquered Ireland?

The streets and buildings of Dublin are full of traces of him; his sense of beauty governed the erection of Dublin Castle itself. As the civilisation of the French middle class is the maker of the streets and buildings of modern Paris, so the civilisation of the English middle class is the maker of the streets and buildings of modern London and Dublin.

Once more. Logic and lucidity in the organising and administering of public business are attractive to many; they are satisfactions to that instinct of intelligence in man which is one of the great powers in his civilisation. The immense, homogeneous, and (comparatively with ours) clear-thinking French middle class prides itself on logic and lucidity in its public business. In our public business logic and lucidity are conspicuous by their absence. Our public business is governed by the wants of our middle class, and is in the hands of public men who anxiously watch those wants. Now, our middle class cares for liberty; it does not care for logic and lucidity. Murdstone and Quinion do not care for logic and lucidity. Salem House and Mr. Creakle have not prepared them for it. Accordingly, we see the proceedings of our chief seat of public business, the House of Commons, governed by rules of which one may, I hope, at least say, without risk of being committed for contempt, that logic

and lucidity have nothing to do with them. Mr. Chamberlain, again, was telling us only the other day, that' England, the greatest commercial nation in the world, has in its bankruptcy law the worst commercial legislation of any civilised country.' To be sure, Mr. Chamberlain has also said, that 'if in England we fall behind other nations in the intelligent appreciation of art, we minister to a hundred wants of which the other nations have no suspicion.' As we are a commercial people, one would have thought that logic and lucidity in commercial legislation was one of these wants to which we minister; however, it seems that we do not. But, outside our own immediate circle, logic and lucidity are felt by many people to be attractive; they inspire respect, their absence provokes ridicule. It is a plea for Home Rule if we inflict the privation of them, in public concerns, upon people of quicker minds, who would by nature be disposed to relish them. Probably the Irish themselves, though they are gainers by the thing, yet laugh in their sleeves at the pedantries and formalities with which our love of liberty, Murdstone and Quinion's love of liberty, and our total want of instinct for logic and lucidity, embarrass our attempts to coerce them. Certainly they must have laughed outright, being people with a keen sense of the ridiculous, when in the information to which the traversers had to plead at the