cured on the sympathies of our earnest, rationalistic, and unimaginative age; but they assume in some subtle and incomprehensible way that their school is based upon man's love and appreciation for his fellow-creatures. If we would but look upon all men as our brothers, it is plainly hinted, all men would be of equal interest to us, and it is our duty, as nineteenth-century citizens, to accept and cherish this universal relationship. To the perpetual sounding of the humanitarian note, there are some, it is true, who answer, with Vernon Lee's very amusing and very wicked skeptic, that "the new-fangled bore called mankind is as great a plague as the old-fashioned nuisance called a soul;" but there are others who, finding themselves in full possession of a conscience, stoutly maintain that they love their undistinguished brother none the less because they weary of his society in literature and art. It was Ruskin, for example, who sneered at George Eliot's characters as the "sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus,"—a terrible misapplication of an inspired phrase; but Ruskin is the last man in Christendom who can be accused of an indifference to his fellow-men.
