literature of its own has arisen, though of an anomalous kind. It
is presided over by a sort of male Miss Kilmansegge, who is also a
model of propriety. It is as though the dragon that guarded the
apples of Hesperides should be a dragon of virtue. Under the
pretence of extolling prudence and perseverance, he paints
money-making as the highest good, and calls it thrift; and the
popularity of this class of book is enormous. The heroes are all
'self-made' men who come to town with that proverbial half-crown
which has the faculty of accumulation that used to be confined to
snowballs. Like the daughters of the horse-leech, their cry is
'Give, give,' only instead of blood they want money; and I need
hardly say they get it from other people's pockets. Love and
friendship are names that have lost their meaning, if they ever
had any, with these gentry. They remind one of the miser of old who
could not hear a large sum of money mentioned without an acceleration
of the action of the heart; and perhaps that is the use of their
hearts, which, otherwise, like that of the spleen in other people,
must be only a subject of vague conjecture. They live abhorred and
die respected; leaving all their heaped-up wealth to some charitable
institution, the secretary of which levants with it eventually to
the United States.

This last catastrophe, however, is not mentioned in these
biographies, the subjects of which are held up as patterns of
wisdom and prudence for the rising generation. I shall have left
the Midway Inn, thank Heaven, for a residence of smaller
dimensions, before it has grown up. Conceive an England inhabited
by self-made men!

Has it ever struck you how gloomy is the poetry of the present day?