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 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.