Religion itself stands aghast at this baptism of gold, which can convert the alien and the heathen, ay, the brigand and the robber, into saints of social prestige. For money bribes the court and pulpit, and buys the press; the highest rank, the highest genius, pay homage to it. If the duke has not money, he will seek in wedlock the most undesirable of women, if she be also the richest. Royalty bows to the splendid cloak of vulgarity, and invites it to dine and drive. Happy day, you will say, for labor, which money symbolizes. Monarchs may well show it respect. But money does not always symbolize honest and intelligent industry. A great fortune often represents transactions akin to theft; sometimes the thing itself, which the world is Spartan enough to approve of, if the criminal can only escape positive detection. Those, too, who have earned their money honestly, leave it to children who turn their back upon the class of which their parents came, and desire to know nothing of the bread-winning arts which they were constrained to practise. We have had, within the last ten years, a severe lesson concerning the instability of wealth in some of its most trusted forms. Yet are we not compelled by sympathy and antipathy, at the bottom of our hearts, to pay it an homage which our lips would not avow? Do we not desire wealth for our children as the condition which shall set our minds at rest concerning them? When we see mediocrity and vulgarity riding in the swift carriage, and wearing the jewels and the robes, bright in everybody's eyes and praised in everybody's mouth, do we not harbor somewhere a regret that we have not, in some way possible to us, set our best abilities to work to secure a similar distinction for ourselves? It should not frighten one to see the court and its underlings venal. Court and courtiers are a show, and money is the condition by which a show lives. But I look into the domain of letters, and ask whether that is still uncorrupted. I do not think that it is. The refined tastes of literary people lead them to value entertainment at the hands of the rich. The luxurious rooms, the abundant table, the easy _persiflage_ in which worldly tact knows enough to flatter recognized talent. Do not these _illicebræ_ seduce, to-day, even the stern heart of philosophy?