among us.  She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook.  If, he says, she watches over sentimentalism with a birch-rod, she is not opposed to romance.  You may love, and warmly love, so long as you are honest.  Do not offend reason.  A lover pretending too much by one foot’s length of pretence, will have that foot caught in her trap.  In Comedy is the singular scene of charity issuing of disdain under the stroke of honourable laughter:  an Ariel released by Prospero’s wand from the fetters of the damned witch Sycorax.  And this laughter of reason refreshed is floriferous, like the magical great gale of the shifty Spring deciding for Summer.  You hear it giving the delicate spirit his liberty.  Listen, for comparison, to an unleavened society:  a low as of the udderful cow past milking hour!  O for a titled ecclesiastic to curse to excommunication that unholy thing!—­So far an enthusiast perhaps; but he should have a hearing.

Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos; and we are not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately know what, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process, on board our modern vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and the general water supply has other uses; and ships well charged with it seem to sail the stiffest:—­there is a touch of pathos.  The Egoist surely inspires pity.  He who would desire to clothe himself at everybody’s expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the actual person.  Only he is not allowed to rush at you, roll you over and squeeze your body for the briny drops.  There is the innovation.

You may as well know him out of hand, as a gentleman of our time and country, of wealth and station; a not flexile figure, do what we may with him; the humour of whom scarcely dimples the surface and is distinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality, have first made the mild literary angels aware of something comic in him, when they were one and all about to describe the gentleman on the heading of the records baldly (where brevity is most complimentary) as a gentleman of family and property, an idol of a decorous island that admires the concrete.  Imps have their freakish wickedness in them to kindle detective vision:  malignly do they love to uncover ridiculousness in imposing figures.  Wherever they catch sight of Egoism they pitch their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim their lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come.  So confident that their grip of an English gentleman, in whom they have spied their game, never relaxes until he begins insensibly to frolic and antic, unknown to himself, and comes out in the native steam which is their scent of the chase.  Instantly off they scour, Egoist and imps.  They will, it is known of them, dog a great House for centuries, and be at the birth of