and the base upon which the cloud descends in rain and storm. Look to
the central portion of society; there the soil is more genial, and its
produce more rich."

"Is it so, in truth?" answered Warner; "pardon me, I believe not: the
middling classes are as human as the rest. There is the region, the
heart, of Avarice,--systematized, spreading, rotting, the very fungus
and leprosy of social states; suspicion, craft, hypocrisy, servility
to the great, oppression to the low, the waxlike mimicry of courtly
vices, the hardness of flint to humble woes; thought, feeling, the
faculties and impulses of man, all ulcered into one great canker,
Gain,--these make the general character of the middling class, the
unleavened mass of that mediocrity which it has been the wisdom of the
shallow to applaud. Pah! we too are of this class, this potter's
earth, this paltry mixture of mud and stone; but we, my friend, we
will knead gold into our clay."

"But look," said Clarence, pointing to the group before them, "look,
yon wretched mother, whose voice an instant ago uttered the coarsest
accents of maudlin and intoxicated prostitution, is now fostering her
infant, with a fondness stamped upon her worn cheek and hollow eye,
which might shame the nice maternity of nobles; and there, too, yon
wretch whom, in the reckless effrontery of hardened abandonment, we
ourselves heard a few minutes since boast of his dexterity in theft,
and openly exhibit its token,--look, he is now, with a Samaritan's own
charity, giving the very goods for which his miserable life was risked
to that attenuated and starving stripling! No, Warner, no! even this
mass is not unleavened. The vilest infamy is not too deep for the
Seraph Virtue to descend and illumine its abyss!"