success. In the calculations of their literary ambition, it was a thing of
course that the people went for nothing. It is apparent in allusions to
the people occurring in these very works, that "the lower sort," "the
vulgar herd," "the canaille," "the mob," "the many-headed beast," "the
million," (and even these designations generally meant something short of
the lowest classes of all,) were no more thought of in any relation to a
state of cultivated intelligence than Turks or Tartars. The readers are
habitually recognized as a kind of select community, conversed with on
topics and in a language with which the vulgar have nothing at all to
do,--a converse the more gratifying on that account. And any casual
allusions to the bulk of the people are expressed in phrases unaffectedly
implying, that they are a herd of beings existing on quite other terms and
for essentially other ends, than we, fine writers, and you, our admiring
readers. It is evident in our literature of that age, (a feature still
more prominent in that of France, at the same and down to a much later
period,) that the main national population, accounted as creatures to
which souls and senses were given just to render their limbs mechanically
serviceable, were regarded by the intellectual aristocracy with hardly so
active a sentiment as contempt; they were not worth that; it was the easy
indifference toward what was seldom thought of as in existence.

Wickedly wrong as such a feeling was, there is no doubt that the actual
state of the people was quite such as would naturally cause it, in men
whose large and richly cultivated minds did not contain philanthropy or
Christian charity enough to regret and pity the popular debasement as a
calamity. For while they were indulging their pride in the elevation, and
their taste in all the luxuries and varieties, of that ampler higher range
of existence enjoyed by such men, in what light must they view the bulk of
a nation, that knew nothing of their wit, genius, or philosophy, could not
even read their writings, but as a coarse mass of living material, the