Again, every parvenu has a right to take his new social gods au grand serieux, but one does not, somehow, expect a man of genius to outdo even the most abject of them at their forms of worship. Mr. Kipling thinks the earth has produced nothing to equal a 'gentleman,' and he is within his rights in thinking so. For our old friend the gentleman is a really nice fellow, of course, as the average sensual man slightly idealised was to be expected to be; yet even the gentleman nowadays does not quite mistake himself for an archangel. But our poetical young parvenu does. He tells in sounding numbers of the earth's heroic workers:
'Gods, for they knew the heart of men; men, for they stooped to fame';
and in his ecstatic contemplation of them (unlike the Irish M.P.'s in this particular, but like Mr. Rudyard Kipling, they are adepts in 'God's law,' including presumably the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, and most of the Catechism), he beholds them having a real good time in heaven, 'hanging with the reckless Seraphim on the reins of red-maned stars,' and so on. Then we have the culmination. God the Father appears:
'And ofttimes cometh our wise Lord God, master of every trade,
And tells them tales of His daily toil, of Edens newly made;
And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid '!
