what out of date,—superseded, we are told, by a finer altruism which rejects the system of reward,—we may still remember Mr. Pater's half rueful admission that it was all "pure profit" to its holder.
When Charles Lamb lamented, with innate perversity, the decay of beggars, he merely withdrew his mind from actualities,—which always annoyed him,—and set it to contemplate those more agreeable figures which were not suffering under the disadvantage of existence. It was the beggar of romance, of the ballads, of the countryside, of the merry old songs, whose departure he professed to regret. The outcast of the London streets could not have been—even in Lamb's time—a desirable feature. To-day we find him the most depressing object in the civilized world; and the fact that he is what is called, in the language of the philanthropist, "unworthy," makes him no whit more cheerful of contemplation. The ragged creature who rushes out of the darkness to cover the wheel of your hansom with his tattered sleeve manages to convey to your mind a sense of degraded wretchedness, calcu-
