I beg leave to return to the more important
consideration of their manners. Most people you meet in your walks in
the common thoroughfare of London, glide, shuffle, or crawl onward, as
if they conscientiously thought they had no manner of right to tread the
earth but on sufferance. Not so our coalheaver. Mark how erect _he_
walks! how firm a keel he presents to the vainly breasting human tide
that comes rolling on with a show of opposition to his onward course!
It is he, and he only, who preserves, in his gait and in his air,
the self-sustained and conscious dignity of the first-created man.
Surrounded by an inferior creation, he gives the wall to none. That
pliancy of temper, which is wont to make itself known by the waiving
a point or renouncing a principle for others' advantage, in him
has no place; he either knows it not, or else considers it a poor,
mean-spirited, creeping baseness, altogether unworthy of his imitation,
and best befitted with ineffable contempt. He neither dreads the contact
of the baker--the Scylla of the metropolitan peripatetic, nor yet shuns
the dire collision of the chimney-sweep--his Charybdis. Try to pass him
as he walks leisurely on, making the solid earth ring with his bold
tread, and you will experience more difficulties in the attempt than did
that famous admiral, Bartholomew Diaz, when he first doubled the Cape of
Storms.
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