Yes! the inmates of those walls had their perilous game of honour, their 'hazard of the die,' in which vice was triumph and infamy success.

We do but share their passion, though we direct it to a better object." Pausing for a moment, as his thoughts flowed into a somewhat different channel of his character, Warner continued, "We have now caught a glimpse of the two great divisions of mankind; they who riot in palaces, and they who make mirth hideous in rags and hovels: own that it is but a poor survey in either.

Can we be contemptible with these or loathsome with those?
Or rather have we not a nobler spark within us, which we have but to fan into a flame that shall burn forever, when these miserable meteors sink into the corruption from which they rise ?" "But," observed Clarence, "these are the two extremes; the pinnacle of civilization, too worn and bare for any more noble and vigorous fruit, 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.