some degree of brevity. To feed you in palaces, to hire captains
and schoolmasters and the choicest spiritual and material
artificers to expend their industries on you, No, by the Eternal!
I have quite other work for that class of artists;
Seven-and-twenty Millions of neglected mortals who have not yet
quite declared for the Devil. Mark it, my diabolic friends, I
mean to lay leather on the backs of you, collars round the necks
of you; and will teach you, after the example of the gods, that
this world is _not_ your inheritance, or glad to see you in it.
You, ye diabolic canaille, what has a Governor much to do with
you? You, I think, he will rather swiftly dismiss from his
thoughts,--which have the whole celestial and terrestrial for
their scope, and not the subterranean of scoundreldom alone.
You, I consider, he will sweep pretty rapidly into some Norfolk
Island, into some special Convict Colony or remote domestic
Moorland, into some stone-walled Silent-System, under hard
drill-sergeants, just as Rhadamanthus, and inflexible as he, and
there leave you to reap what you have sown; he meanwhile turning
his endeavors to the thousand-fold immeasurable interests of men
and gods,--dismissing the one extremely contemptible interest of
scoundrels; sweeping that into the cesspool, tumbling that over
London Bridge, in a very brief manner, if needful! Who are you,
ye thriftless sweepings of Creation, that we should forever be
pestered with you? Have we no work to do but drilling Devil's
regiments of the line?

If I had schoolmasters, my benevolent friend, do you imagine I
would set them on teaching a set of unteachables, who as you
perceive have already made up their mind that black is
white,--that the Devil namely is the advantageous Master to serve