“Is it so, in truth?” answered Warner; “pardon me, I believe not: the middling classes are as human as the rest. There is the region, the heart, of Avarice,--systematized, spreading, rotting, the very fungus and leprosy of social states; suspicion, craft, hypocrisy, servility to the great, oppression to the low, the waxlike mimicry of courtly vices, the hardness of flint to humble woes; thought, feeling, the faculties and impulses of man, all ulcered into one great canker, Gain,--these make the general character of the middling class, the unleavened mass of that mediocrity which it has been the wisdom of the shallow to applaud. Pah! we too are of this class, this potter’s earth, this paltry mixture of mud and stone; but we, my friend, we will knead gold into our clay.” “But look,” said Clarence, pointing to the group before them, “look, yon wretched mother, whose voice an instant ago uttered the coarsest accents of maudlin and intoxicated prostitution, is now fostering her infant, with a fondness stamped upon her worn cheek and hollow eye, which might shame the nice maternity of nobles; and there, too, yon wretch whom, in the reckless effrontery of hardened abandonment, we ourselves heard a few minutes since boast of his dexterity in theft, and openly exhibit its token,--look, he is now, with a Samaritan’s own charity, giving the very goods for which his miserable life was risked to that attenuated and starving stripling! No, Warner, no! even this mass is not unleavened. The vilest infamy is not too deep for the Seraph Virtue to descend and illumine its abyss!” “Out on the weak fools!” said the artist, bitterly: “it would be something, if they could be consistent even in crime!” and, placing his arm in Linden’s, he drew him away. As the picture grew beneath the painter’s hand, Clarence was much struck with the outline and expression of countenance given to the regicide Bradshaw. “They are but an imperfect copy of the living original from whom I have borrowed them,” said Warner, in answer to Clarence’s remark upon the sternness of the features. “But that original--a relation of mine, is coming here to-day: you shall see him.”