ren who sit in counting-houses or brew beer. They are readier, indeed, to moralize over the knife-grinder, but quite as slow to tip him the coveted sixpence. Shelley, whose soul swelled at the wrongs of all mankind, did not hesitate to inflict pain on the one human being whom it was his obvious duty to protect. But then Shelley, like Carlyle, belonged to the category of reformers rather than to the pessimists; believing that though the world as he saw it was as bad as possible, things could be easily mended by simply turning them topsy-turvy under his direction. Now the pessimist proper is the most modest of men. He does not flatter himself for a moment that he can alter the existing state of evil, or that the human race, by its combined efforts, can do anything better than simply cease to live. He may entertain with Novalis a shadowy hope that when mankind, wearied of its own impotence, shall efface itself from the bosom of the earth, a better and happier species shall fill the vacant land. Or he may believe with Hartmann that there is even less felicity possible in the coming centuries than in the present day; that humanity is already on the wane; that the
