not always receive the fairest treatment at your hands, and which ought to be resolutely defended against you. There is really, in nature, such a thing as high life. There is really, in nature, a difference between the life of a gentleman who has culture, and fine bodily health, and independence, and the life of a Sheffield dry-grinder who cannot have any one of these three things. It is a good and not a bad sign of the state of popular intelligence when the people does not wilfully shut its eyes to the differences of condition amongst men, and when those who have the opportunity of leading what is truly the high life accept its discipline joyfully and have a just pride in keeping themselves up to their ideal. A life of health, of sound morality, of disinterested intellectual activity, of freedom from petty cares, _is_ higher than a life of disease, and vice, and stupidity, and sordid anxiety. I maintain that it is right and wise in a nation to set before itself the highest attainable ideal of human life as the existence of the complete gentleman, and that an envious democracy, instead of rendering a service to itself, does exactly the contrary when it cannot endure and will not tolerate the presence of high-spirited gentlemen in the State. There are things in this world that it is right to hate, that we are the better for hating with all our hearts; and one of the things that I hate most, and with most reason, is the narrow class-spirit when it sets itself against the great interests of mankind. It is odious in the narrow-minded, pompous, selfish, pitiless aristocrat who thinks that the sons of the people were made by Almighty God to be his lackeys and their daughters to be his mistresses; it is odious also, to the full as odious, in the narrow-minded, envious democrat who cannot bear to see any elegance of living, or grace of manner, or culture of mind above the range of his own capacity or his own purse. Let me recommend to your consideration the following words, written by one young nobleman about another young nobleman, and reminding us, as we much need to be reminded, that life may be not only honest and vigorous, but also noble and beautiful. Robert Lytton says of Julian Fane-- "He was, I think, the most graceful and accomplished gentleman of the generation he adorned, and by this generation, at least, appropriate place should be reserved for the memory of a man in whose character the most universal sympathy with all the intellectual culture of his age was united to a refinement of social form, and a perfection of personal grace, which, in spite of all its intellectual culture, the age is sadly in want of. There is an artistry of life as well as of literature, and the perfect knighthood of Sidney is no less precious to the world than the genius of Spenser."