mere earthy substratum of humanity, not to be accounted of in any
comparison or even relation to what man is in his higher style? While they
of that higher style were revelling in their mental affluence, the vast
majority of the inhabitants of the island were subsisting, and had always
subsisted, on the most beggarly pittance on which mind could be barely
kept alive. Probably they had at that time still fewer ideas than the
people of the former age which we have been describing. For many of those
with which popery had occupied the faith and fancy of that earlier
generation, had now vanished from the popular mind, without being replaced
in equal number by better ideas, or by ideas of any kind. And then their
vices had the whole grossness of vice, and their favorite amusements were
at best rude and boisterous, and a large proportion of them savage and
cruel. So that when we look at the shining wits, poets, and philosophers,
of that age, they appear like gaudy flowers growing in a putrid marsh.

And to a much later period this deplorable ignorance, with all its
appropriate consequences, continued to be the dishonor and the plague of
the intellectual and moral condition of the inhabitants of England. Of
England! which had through many centuries made so great a figure in
Christendom; which has been so splendid in arms, liberty, legislation,
science, and all manner of literature: which has boasted its universities,
of ancient foundation and proudest fame, munificently endowed, and
possessing, in their accumulations of literary treasure, nearly the whole
results of all the strongest thinking there had been in the world: and
which has had also, through the charity of individuals, such a number of
minor institutions for education, that the persons intrusted to see them
administered have, in very numerous instances, not scrupled to divert
their resources to total different purposes, lest, perchance, the cause of
damage to the people should change from a lack of knowledge to a repletion
of it. Of England! so long after the Reformation, and all the while under