Note 5 — LETTER LIII.

Now the moment that the Mammon devil gets his bellows put in men’s ears,—however innocent they may be, however free from actual stain of avarice, they become literally deaf to the teaching of true and noble men. My correspondent imagines himself to have read Shakespeare and Goethe;—he cannot understand a sentence of them, or he would have known the meaning of the Merchant of Venice,5 and of the vision of Plutus, and speech of Mephistopheles on the Emperor’s paper-money6 in the second part of Faust, and of the continual under-current of similar teaching in it, from its opening in the mountain sunrise, presently commented on by the Astrologer, under the prompting of Mephistopheles,—“the Sun itself is pure Gold,”—to the ditch-and-grave-digging scene of its close. He cannot read Xenophon, nor Lucian,—nor Plato, nor Horace, nor Pope,—nor Homer, nor Chaucer—nor Moses, nor David. All these are mere voices of the Night to him; the bought bellows-blower of the “Times” is the only piper who is in tune to his ear.