We take the subject of our sketch, then, somewhere between the abjectly poor and those in moderate circumstances. What we have to say may apply to either sex, and to any grade in this division of the human family, from the hodman and washerwoman up to the hard-working, poorly-paid lawyer clerk, schoolmaster, or scribe. The advantages of such a position are many. In the first place, you belong, inevitably, to the active and suffering part of the world. You know the ills that try men's souls and bodies. You cannot creep into a safe retreat, arrogantly to judge, or heartlessly to forget, the others. They are always before you; you see the path stained by their bleeding feet; stupid and flinty, indeed, must you be, if you can hastily wound, or indolently forbear to aid them. Then, as to yourself, you know what your resources are; what you can do, what bear; there is small chance for you to escape a well-tempered modesty. Then again, if you find power in yourself to endure the trial, there is reason and reality in some degree of self-reliance. The moral advantages of such training can scarcely fail to amount to something; and as to the mental, that most important chapter, how the lives of men are fashioned and transfused by the experience of passion and the development of thought, presents new sections at every turn, such as the distant dilettante's opera-glasses will never detect,--to say nothing of the exercise of mere faculty, which, though insensible in its daily course, leads to results of immense importance. But the evils, the disadvantages, the dangers, how many, how imminent! True, indeed, they are so. There is the early bending of the mind to the production of marketable results, which must hinder all this free play of intelligence, and deaden the powers that craved instruction. There is the callousness produced by the sight of more misery than it is possible to relieve; the heart, at first so sensitive, taking refuge in a stolid indifference against the pangs of sympathetic pain, it had not force to bear. There is the perverting influence of uncongenial employments, undertaken without or against choice, continued at unfit hours and seasons, till the man loses his natural relations with summer and winter, day and night, and has no sense more for natural beauty and joy. There is the mean providence, the perpetual caution to guard against ill, instead of the generous freedom of a mind which expects good to ensue from all good actions. There is the sad doubt whether it will _do_ to indulge the kindly impulse, the calculation of dangerous chances, and the cost between the loving impulse and its fulfilment. Yes; there is bitter chance of narrowness, meanness, and dulness on this path, and it requires great natural force, a wise and large view of life taken at an early age, or fervent trust in God, to evade them.