“* * * he found that enormous beast comprehensible only when it applauded him; and besides, he wished it warmly well; all that was good for it; plentiful dinners, country excursions, stout menagerie bars, music, a dance, and to bed; he was for patting, stroking, petting the mob, for tossing it sops, never for irritating it to show an eye-tooth, much less for causing it to exhibit the grinders.” Everard Romfrey, of sterner stuff, sees the advantage of tempering mercy with justice:[298] “To his mind the game-laws were the corner-stone of Law, and of a man’s right to hold his own; and so delicately did he think the country poised, that an attack on them threatened the structure of justice. The three conjoined Estates were therefore his head gamekeepers; their duty was to back him against the poacher, if they would not see the country tumble. * * * No tenants were forced to take his farms. He dragged no one by the collar. He gave them liberty to go to Australia, Canada, the Americas, if they liked. * * * Still there were grumbling tenants. He swarmed with game, and though he was liberal, his hares and his birds were immensely destructive: computation could not fix the damage done by them. Probably the farmers expected them not to eat. ‘There are two parties to a bargain,’ said Everard, ‘and one gets the worst of it. But if he was never obliged to make it, where’s his right to complain?’ Men of sense rarely obtain satisfactory answers; they are provoked to despise their kind.” He returns to the argument, deepened in unavoidable pessimism:[299] “This behavior of corn-law agitators and protectors of poachers was an hypocrisy too horrible for comment. Everard sipped claret.” The novels which depict the really acute phases of labor and poverty,--_Sybil_, _Mary Barton_, _North and South_, _Shirley_, _Alton Locke_, _Hard Times_, (diagnosed by Macaulay as “sullen socialism”), _Put Yourself in his Place_, _Felix Holt_,--are apt to have John Barton’s kind of laugh, if any, “a low chuckle, that had no mirth in it.” But the author of the first of these puts into another story a pungent little description:[300] “The Elysians consisted of a few thousand beautified mortals, the only occupation of whose existence was enjoyment; the rest of the population comprised some millions of Gnomes and Sylphs, who did nothing but work, and ensured by their labour the felicity of the superior class.” It is inevitable that the artist and the humorist should find their most congenial fields in those relationships that are vital, and not too hampered by the technique of more formal and crystallized institutions. Prisons, Asylums, Courts, and the whole legal machinery, offer a less inviting prospect than do political parties and theories, and the contrast between social strata.