Book excerpt: Excerpt from Modern Grub Street Other Essays The common multitude, the masses, the mere herd, as we superior persons call them, plod away darkly all their lives down in the cellarage and universal basement; an almost equally large crowd of the undistinguished is for ever drudging on the ground floor fussier and presumably more important workmen are occupied on the difierent tiers of scaffolding higher and higher up, till on the uppermost circle you behold none but the very aristocracy of the building trade genteelly doing their day's work in kid gloves and conjuring daintily with jewelled trowels. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.