228 A Walk from 



bovine gaze, the brutality and recklessness, and the 

 simple audacity, and the confessed hatred of his 

 betters, which mark the English peasant, unless 

 some happy fortune has saved him from the general 

 lot, and persuaded him that life has something besides 

 beer that the poor man may have and may relish." 



Now this is a sad picture truly. The pen is sharp 

 and cuts like a knife, but it is the surgeon's knife, 

 not the poisoned barb of a foreigner's taunt. This is 

 the hopeful and promising aspect of these delineations 

 and denunciations of the laboring man's condition. 

 That low, damp, ill-ventilated, contracted room in 

 which he pens his family at night, was, quite likely, 

 constructed in the days of Grood Queen Bess, or when 

 " Greorge the Third was King," at the latest. And 

 houses were built for good, substantial farmers in 

 those days which they would hardly house their 

 horses in noAv. There are hundreds of mechanics 

 and day-laborers in Edinburgh who pen their fami- 

 lies nightly in 'apartments once owned and occupied 

 by Scotch dukes and earls, but which a journeyman 

 shoe-maker of New England would be loth to live 

 in rent free. Even the favorite room of Queen 

 Mary, in Holyrood Palace, in which she was wont 

 to tea and talk with Bizzio, would be too small and 

 dim for the shop-parlor of a small London trades- 



