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TIME AND TIDE.

only in so far as the artist in question has died of distress while he was catering for the public amusement. Hardly a week now passes without some such misery coming to my knowledge; and the quantity of pain, and anxiety of daily effort, through the best part of life, ending all at last in utter grief, which the lower middle classes in England are now suffering, is so great that I feel constantly as if I were living in one great churchyard, with people all round me clinging feebly to the edges of the open graves, and calling for help, as they fall back into them, out of sight.

113. Now I want you to observe here, in a definite case, the working of your beautiful modern political economy of "supply and demand." Here is a man who could have "supplied" you with good and entertaining art,—say for fifty good years,—if you had paid him enough for his day's work to find him and his children peacefully in bread. But you like having your prints as cheap as possible—you triumph in the little that your laugh costs—you take all you can get from the man, give the least you can give to him,—and you accordingly kill him at thirty-nine;