I can't afford to give all
my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those
feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the
foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I
touch for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy. Neither are
picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals half so frequent as your
common labourer, who gets his own bread and eats it vulgarly but
creditably with his own pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should
have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who
weighs out my sugar in a vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with
the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers--more needful that
my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle
goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in
the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps rather too corpulent and
in other respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds
of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublimest
abstract of all clerical graces that was ever conceived by an able
novelist.
And so I come back to Mr. Irwine, with whom I desire you to be in
perfect charity, far as he may be from satisfying your demands on the
clerical character.
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