Taking for his text the apprenticeship of good Abbot Samson at St. Edmund’s shrine, Mr. Carlyle moralises on how much would many a Serene Highness have learnt, had he travelled through the world with water-jug and empty wallet, _sine omni expensâ_, and returned only to sit down at the foot of St. Edmund’s shrine to shackles and bread and water. Patriotism itself, a political economist has remarked, can never be generated by a passive enjoyment of good; the evil tendency of which he bids us see by merely looking to a city like London; where the rich who live together in streets of fine houses many miles long, and have every comfort provided for them without their interference, and need nothing from the poor but what they buy for money, and conclude that the same State which cares for them will care equally for the poor,—such rich men, it is alleged, have every inducement to become isolated from all but the few with whom it is pleasant to live. We may choose, says Professor Kingsley, to look at the masses in the gross as subjects for statistics—and of course, where possible, for profits. “There is One above who knows every thirst, and ache, and sorrow, and temptation of each slattern, and gin-drinker, and street boy. The day will come when He will require an account of these neglects of ours—not in the gross.” Mrs. Gaskell ably describes the fear of Margaret Hale, in “North and South,” lest, in her West-end ease, she should become sleepily deadened into forgetfulness of anything beyond the life that was lapping her round with luxury. “There might be toilers and moilers there in London, but she never saw them; the very servants lived in an underground world of their own, of which she knew neither the hopes nor the fears; they only seemed to start into existence when some want or whim of their master and mistress needed them.” Mr. Thackeray presents Ethel Newcome in the fairest light when he shows her studious to become acquainted with her indigent neighbours—giving much time to them and thought; visiting from house to house without ostentation; awe-stricken by that spectacle of poverty which we have with us always, of which the sight rebukes our selfish griefs into silence, the thought compels us to charity, humility, and devotion. “Death never dying out; hunger always crying; and children born to it day after day,—our young London lady, flying from the splendours and follies in which her life had been passed, found herself in the presence of these; threading darkling alleys which swarmed with wretched life; sitting by naked beds, whither by God’s blessing she was sometimes enabled to carry a little comfort and consolation; or whence she came heart-stricken by the overpowering misery, or touched by the patient resignation, of the new friends to whom fate had directed her.” No longer _ignara mali, miseris succurrere discit_. An essayist of Mr. Thackeray’s school, on the topic of parliamentary trains, breaks