Hodge for the
most part lives and dies in his ancestral village: marries Mary, the
daughter of Hodge Secundus of that parish, and begets assorted Hodges
and Marys in vast quantities, all of the same pattern, to replenish the
earth in the next generation. There you have a very well-marked
hereditary caste, little given to intermixture with others, and from
whose members, however recruited by fresh blood, the object of our
quest, the Divine Genius, is very unlikely to find his point of origin.
Then there is the town artisan caste, sprung originally, indeed, from
the ranks of the Hodges, but naturally selected out of its most active,
enterprising, and intelligent individuals, and often of many generations
standing in various forms of handicraft. This is a far higher and more
promising type of humanity, from the judicious intermixture of whose
best elements we are apt to get our Stephensons, our Arkwrights, our
Telfords, and our Edisons. In a rank of life just above the last, we
find the fixed and immobile farmer caste, which only rarely blossoms
out, under favourable circumstances on both sides, into a stray Cobbett
or an almost miraculous miller Constable. The shopkeepers are a tribe of
more varied interests and more diversified lives. An immense variety of
brain elements are called into play by their diverse functions in
diverse lines; and when we take them in conjunction with the upper
mercantile grades, which are chiefly composed of their ablest and most
successful members, we get considerable chances of those happy blendings
of individual excellences in their casual marriages which go to make up
talent, and, in their final outcome, genius.
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