Ruskin’s tea-shop.’ Meanwhile the business languishes, and the rent and taxes absorb the profits, and something more, after the salary of my good servants has been paid. In all these cases, however, I can see that I am defeated only because I have too many things on hand: and that neither rabbits at Coniston, road-surveyors at Croydon, or mud in St. Giles’s would get the better of me, if I could give exclusive attention to any one business: meantime, I learn the difficulties which are to be met, and shall make the fewer mistakes when I venture on any work with other people’s money. I may as well, together with these confessions, print a piece written for the end of a Fors letter at Assisi, a month or two back, but for which I had then no room, referring to the increase of commercial, religious, and egotistic insanity, [66] in modern society, and delicacy of the distinction implied by that long wall at Hanwell, between the persons inside it, and out. ‘Does it never occur to me,’ (thus the letter went on) ‘that I may be mad myself?’ Well, I am so alone now in my thoughts and ways, that if I am not mad, I should soon become so, from mere solitude, but for my work. But it must be manual work. Whenever I succeed in a drawing, I am happy, in spite of all that surrounds me of sorrow. It is a strange feeling;—not gratified vanity: I can have any quantity of praise I like from some sorts of people; but that does me no vital good, (though dispraise does me mortal harm); whereas to succeed to my own satisfaction in a manual piece of work, is life,—to me, as to all men; and it is only the peace which comes necessarily from manual labour which in all time has kept the honest country people patient in their task of maintaining the rascals who live in towns. But we are in hard times, now, for all men’s wits; for men who know the truth are like to go mad from isolation; and the fools are all going mad in ‘Schwärmerei,’—only that is much the pleasanter way. Mr. Lecky, for instance, quoted in last Fors; how pleasant for him to think he is ever so much wiser than Aristotle; and that, as a body, the men of his generation are the wisest that ever were born—giants of intellect, according to Lord Macaulay, compared to the pigmies of Bacon’s time, and the minor pigmies of Christ’s time, and the minutest of all, the microscopic pigmies of Solomon’s time, and, finally, the vermicular and infusorial pigmies—twenty-three millions to the cube inch—of Mr. Darwin’s time, whatever that may be. How pleasant for Mr. Lecky to live in these days of the Anakim,—“his spear, to equal which, the tallest pine,” etc., etc., which no man Stratford-born could have lifted, much less shaken.