As little did they think of foretelling a day, generations hence, when the empty heirs of his fellows might prefer a modest claim (confused in statement) to compensation against the estate he bequeathed: for such prophecy as that would have hinted at a tenderness for the mass to the detriment of the individual, and such tenderness as that is an element of our religion, not the drift of our teaching.
He grumbled at the heavy taxation of his estate during life: yearly this oppressed old man paid thousands of pounds to the Government.

It was poor encouragement to shoulder and elbow your way from a hovel to a mansion! He paid the money, dying sour; a splendid example of energy on the road, a forbidding one at the terminus.

And here the moral of the popular books turned aside from him to snatch at humanity for an instance of our frailness and dealt in portentous shadows:--we are, it should be known, not the great creatures we assume ourselves to be.

Six months before his death he appeared in the garb of a navvy, humbly soliciting employment at his own house-door.

There he appealed to the white calves of his footmen for a day's work, upon the plea that he had never been a democrat.
The scene had been described with humanely-moralising pathos in the various books of stories of Men who have come to Fortune, and it had for a length of seasons an annual position in the foremost rank (on the line, facing the door) in our exhibition of the chosen artists, where, as our popular words should do, it struck the spectator's eye and his brain simultaneously with pugilistic force: a reference to the picture in the catalogue furnishing a recapitulation of the incident.