It happens, however, that all men are more or less remote from the greatness and goodness of this ideal character. We are, as yet, only in a state of comparative approximation to those qualities; hence we find that nearly all are alike given to speak slightingly of each other. There are two grand causes at the bottom of this—Selfishness and Thoughtlessness. The former gives us such an intense appreciation of ourselves, and of the rank we hold in society, that we speak and think as if every man and every class beneath us were too mean to be entitled to the least respect; we look upon the whole as a degraded caste, whose very existence must only be acknowledged indirectly, as a thing we have become acquainted with by seeing it at a distance, not by having ever come in contact with it. In this view of society our ordinary literature is very apt to confirm us. The key-note is there struck always in _alt._ The whole strain of the work, its characters, its philosophy, its manners, are presumed to be something above the common level; for literary men are still, after all, very much the slaves of the great which they used to be. If the writer describes humble life at all, he describes it as seen by a bird’s-eye view from some lofty station—not as seen by a person who mingles in it, and partakes of its sympathies. Even the middle ranks of the community, who in this country form the great mass of readers, and from which, moreover, almost all literary men arise, have no literature of their own: they have to read a literature which has been calculated for the sphere above them, and in which, of course, their sympathies must be of an imperfect character. And thus, after all that has been done, it still appears a desideratum that there should be both a literature and a philosophy _for the human race_.