populous streets, would the two young and unfriended competitors for
this world's high places roam with the various crowd, moralizing as
they went or holding dim conjecture upon their destinies to be. And
often would they linger beneath the portico of some house where,
"haunted with great resort," Pleasure and Pomp held their nightly
revels, to listen to the music that, through the open windows, stole
over the rare exotics with which wealth mimics the southern scents,
and floated, mellowing by distance, along the unworthy streets; and
while they stood together, silent and each feeding upon separate
thoughts, the artist's pale lip would curl with scorn, as he heard the
laugh and the sounds of a frivolous and hollow mirth ring from the
crowd within, and startle the air from the silver spell which music
had laid upon it. "These," would he say to Clarence, "these are the
dupes of the same fever as ourselves: like us, they strive and toil
and vex their little lives for a distinction from their race.
Ambition comes to them, as to all: but they throw for a different
prize than we do; theirs is the honour of a day, ours is immortality;
yet they take the same labour and are consumed by the same care. And,
fools that they are, with their gilded names and their gaudy
trappings, they would shrink in disdain from that comparison with us
which we, with a juster fastidiousness, blush at this moment to
acknowledge."

From these scenes they would rove on, and, both delighting in
contrast, enter some squalid and obscure quarter of the city. There,
one night, quiet observers of their kind, they paused beside a group
congregated together by some common cause of obscene merriment or
unholy fellowship--a group on which low vice had set her sordid and
hideous stamp--to gaze and draw strange humours or a motley moral from
that depth and ferment of human nature into whose sink the thousand