It must be remembered, also, how difficult it has become to define the term "filthy" with precision, in the present state, moral and physical, of the English atmosphere; and still more so, to judge how far, in that healthy element, a moderate and delicately sanctified appetite for gold may be developed into livelier qualms of hunger for righteousness. It may be matter of private opinion how far the lucre derived by your Lordship from commission on the fares and refreshments of the passengers by the North-Western may be odoriferous or precious, in the same sense as the ointment on the head of Aaron; or how far that received by the Primate of England in royalties on the circulation of improving literature[129] may enrich--as with perfumes out of broken alabaster--the empyreal air of Addington. But the higher class of laborers in the Lord's vineyard might surely, with true grace, receive, from the last unto the first, the reflected instruction so often given by the first unto the last, "Be content with your wages." (H) "It may, perhaps, not improperly be said," The Bible Society will doubtless in future gratefully prefix this guarantee to their publications. (I) "Which we are told." Can we then no more find for ourselves this writing on our hearts--or has it ceased to be legible? 164. (K) "Remunerative employment." I cannot easily express the astonishment with which I find a man of your Lordship's intelligence taking up the common phrase of "giving employment," as if, indeed, labor were the best gift which the rich could bestow on the poor. Of course, every idle vagabond, be he rich or poor, "gives employment" to some otherwise enough burdened wretch, to provide his dinner and clothes for him; and every vicious vagabond, in the destructive power of his vice, gives sorrowful occupation to the energies of resisting and renovating virtue. The idle child who litters its nursery and tears its frock, gives employment to the housemaid and seamstress; the idle woman, who litters her drawing-room with trinkets, and is ashamed to be seen twice in the same dress, is, in your Lordship's view, the enlightened supporter of the arts and manufactures of her country. At the close of your letter, my Lord, you, though in measured terms, indignantly dissent from my statement of the power of great cities for evil, and indeed I have perhaps been led, by my prolonged study of the causes of the Fall of Venice, into clearer recognition of some of these urban influences than may have been possible to your Lordship in the center of the virtues and proprieties which have been blessed by Providence in the rise of Manchester. But the Scriptural symbol of the power of temptation in the hand of the spiritual Babylon--"all kings have been drunk with the wine of her Fornication"--is perfectly literal in its exposition of the special influence of cities over a vicious, that is to say, a declining, people. They are the foci of its fornication, and the