This shadow of inconsistency is still more perceptible when speaking of the lives and _characters_ of his socialists. Sometimes the reader receives the impression that an egregious vanity, an eccentric ambition, and perhaps a little touch of monomania, would complete the picture, and sufficiently explain that conduct, of a hero of socialism. At another time his enthusiasts assume a more imposing aspect. St Simon sacrificing his fortune, abjuring the patronage of the court, dying in extreme poverty--Charles Fourier refusing all entrance into commerce that would implicate him with a vicious system, and pursuing to the end, amidst want and ridicule, the labours of social regeneration--our own Robert Owen quitting ease and fortune, and crossing the Atlantic for the New World, there to try, upon a virgin soil, his bold experiment of a new society;--these men rise before us endowed with a certain courage and devotion which ought to command our admiration. We see them in the light of martyrs to a faith which no one shares with them--sacrificing all, enduring all, for a hope which _is_ of this world, for schemes which they will never see realized, for a heaven which they may prophesy, but which they cannot enter; manifesting, in short, the same obstinacy of idea, and the same renouncement of self, which distinguish the founders of new religions. And indeed we are not disposed to deny, that in their character they may bear a comparison, in many points, with religious impostors. There is this striking difference, however, in the effect of their teaching: the religious impostor has often promised a paradise of merely voluptuous enjoyment, but he has promised it as the reward of certain self-denying virtues to be practised here on earth; whilst the socialist insists upon bringing his sensual ill-ordered paradise, wherein all virtue is dispensed with as superfluous, here, at once, upon this earth we have to live and toil in.