He read Scripture aloud to his family and assistants, went to chapel regularly, observed Sunday scrupulously, behind drawn window blinds, believed in small profits and quick returns, drove a good trade, and held his head high, for the sober, God-fearing, enterprising shopkeeper that he was. At meal times this fellow would hold forth on grace--a virtue in which he was strangely lacking--also on obeying the precepts of Christ. "Ah," he would say, rolling the yellows of his greedy little eyes; "ah, that I were more like the Master!" Now, this speech incessantly on the lips of a sweater and a hypocrite began to cause the Man of Feeling's gorge to rise, for he was a healthy, decent liver, and a hater of cant. So one day, when the Respectable lifted his gaze to the ceiling and muttered his usual aspiration, the Man of Feeling could endure the sickening ordeal no longer. "Like the Master!" he cried vehemently. "You wish to be like the Master, and you pay your female assistants eight or ten shillings a week, and expect them to live on that miserable sum! Don't insult Christ! Don't cant and pretend that you wish to be a penniless socialist, and go about trying to do good. _You!_" And, with these words, the Man of Feeling arose, and left that Respectable house, shaking its dust from his feet, and panting to breathe once more a pure and bracing air among the Non-Respectables, to whom, by moral conviction, he rightly belonged. Ah! "the mud-hearted Bourgeois!" I don't wonder that another Man of Feeling, poor, sensitive, pitying, indignant Francis Adams, called you by that title! Can you by any human power be dragged out of the slime in which you love to wallow? Yet these are the censors of genius, the founders of public taste, the friends of religion, the conservers of morality, forsooth! Every little shallow, mean-souled Respectable thinks himself capable of deciding that Shelley and Burns were "immoral;" that this or that work of genius is "injurious to morals;" that one brilliant man is morally incapacitated from assisting in legislation, and that another ought to be imprisoned for the expression of heterodox religious or political opinions. British Respectability makes Britain the laughing-stock and butt of the wits of the world. Nay, more; the Respectable's stupid blatant "patriotism" and bullying arrogance cause us to be hated in all the quarters of the globe. I repeat that Respectability is practically incompatible with moral worth. With true, sound, broad morality it is quite incompatible. You cannot grow grapes on thorn bushes, nor force lilies among stinging-nettles. Politics, commerce, the relations of the sexes, science, art, and literature, are all more or less corrupted by the mephitic blight of Respectability.