The great in those days had not lost "that touch of nature" which "makes the whole world kin" so completely, as to see no grace in simplicity, to find no beauty in what is beautiful alike to all, to enjoy nothing which can be enjoyed by others than the great and wealthy. The humble had not been, then, bowed so low that the necessities had precluded all thought, all care, for the graces of the existence of man. If the division between the noble and the common of the human race, as established by birth, by hereditary rank, by unalterable caste, were stronger and deeper and less eradicable than at this day, the real division, as visible in his nature, between man and man, of the noble and the common, the difference in his tastes, his enjoyments, his pleasures, his capacity no less than his power of enjoying, was a mere nothing then, to what it is to-day. The servants, the very serfs, of aristocracy, in those days, when aristocracy was the rule of blood and bravery, were not, by a hundredth part, so far removed below the proudest of their lords, in every thing that renders humanity graceful and even glorious, in every thing that renders life enjoyable, as are, at this day, the workers fallen below the employers, when nobility has ceased to be, and aristocracy is the sway of capital, untinctured with intelligence, and ignorant of gentleness or grace. It is not that the capitalist is richer, and the operative poorer--though this is true to the letter--than was the prince, than was the serf of those days. It is not only that the aristocrat of capital, the noble by the grace of gold, is ten times more arrogant, more insulting, more soulless, cold-hearted, and calmly cruel, than the aristocrat of the sword, the noble by the grace of God; and that the worker is worked more hardly, clad more humbly, fed more sparely, than the villain of the middle ages--though this, also, is true to the letter--but it is, that the very tastes, the enjoyments, and the capacities for enjoyment, in a word, almost the nature of the two classes are altered, estranged, unalterably divided. The rich and great have, with a few rare exceptions that serve only to prove the rule, lost all taste for the simple, for the natural, for the beautiful, unless it be the beautiful of art and artifice; the poor and lowly have, for the most part, lost all taste, all perception of the beautiful, of the graceful, in any shape, all enjoyment of any thing beyond the tangible, the sensual, the real.