174 GLAUCUS; OR, 
we rowed on, arose the recollection of many a brave 
and wise friend, whose lot was cast in no such 
western paradise, but rather in the infernos of this 
sinful earth, toiling even then amid the festering 
alleys of Bermondsey and Bethnal Green, to palliate 
death and misery which they had vainly laboured to 
prevent, watching the strides of that very cholera 
which they had been striving for years to ward off, 
now re-admitted in spite of all their warnings, by the © 
carelessness, and laziness, and greed of sinful man. 
And as I thought over the whole hapless question of 
sanitary reform, proved long since a moral duty to 
God and man, possible, easy, even pecuniarily profit- 
able, and yet left undone, there seemed a sublime 
irony, most humbling to man, in some of Nature’s 
processes, and in the silent and unobtrusive perfec- 
tion with which she has been taught to anticipate, 
since the foundation of the world, some of the loftiest 
discoveries of modern science, of which we are too 
apt to boast as if we had created the method by dis- 
covering its possibility. Created it? Alas for the 
pride of human genius, and the autotheism which 
