Nor was the dull but moral
maxim at less discount than the witty but improper epigram. Essays
inculcating the most superior virtues failed to counterbalance a day's
charing, and the finest spiritualistic soft soap would not wash clothes.
Even the washerwoman deemed her work more real and valuable than the
manufacture of moralities too fine for use, and the deliberate effusion
of sentiments too good to be true.
"In those days, too, a complete political platform, comprising a score of
first-class articles of faith, sold at a pair of second-hand
slop-trousers, and a speech of three hours and three hundred parentheses
could not fetch more than a pot of jam in the open market. The workhouses
were crowded with politicians, critics, poets, novelists, bishops,
sporting tipsters, scholars, heirs, soldiers, dudes, painters,
journalists, peers, bookmakers, landlords, punsters, idealists, and other
incorrigible persons. Nothing was more curious and heartrending in the
history of this transition to a new stage than the rapidity with which
those who had been most exigent towards life bated their terms. Men who,
in their aspirations after the Good and the Beautiful and the True, had
unwittingly wasted an intolerable deal of the world's substance in
riotous idealising,--men who had so long breathed the atmosphere of
ottomans and rose-leaves that they were barely conscious of their
privileges,--now found themselves clamouring for bread wherewith to stay
the cravings of their inner selves, and accounted themselves happy if
they found a roof to shelter them.
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