from the higher sensibility that accompanies higher culture, are
perhaps less pitiable than that dreary absence of impersonal
enjoyment and consolation which leaves ruder minds to the perpetual
urgent companionship of their own griefs and discontents. The lives
of those rural forefathers, whom we are apt to think very prosaic
figures--men whose only work was to ride round their land, getting
heavier and heavier in their saddles, and who passed the rest of
their days in the half-listless gratification of senses dulled by
monotony--had a certain pathos in them nevertheless. Calamities
came to _them_ too, and their early errors carried hard
consequences: perhaps the love of some sweet maiden, the image of
purity, order, and calm, had opened their eyes to the vision of a
life in which the days would not seem too long, even without
rioting; but the maiden was lost, and the vision passed away, and
then what was left to them, especially when they had become too
heavy for the hunt, or for carrying a gun over the furrows, but to
drink and get merry, or to drink and get angry, so that they might
be independent of variety, and say over again with eager emphasis
the things they had said already any time that twelvemonth?
Assuredly, among these flushed and dull-eyed men there were some
whom--thanks to their native human-kindness--even riot could
never drive into brutality; men who, when their cheeks were fresh,
had felt the keen point of sorrow or remorse, had been pierced by
the reeds they leaned on, or had lightly put their limbs in fetters
from which no struggle could loose them; and under these sad
circumstances, common to us all, their thoughts could find no
resting-place outside the ever-trodden round of their own petty
history.

That, at least, was the condition of Godfrey Cass in this