as vividly as man’s heart and brain in their union excel his plain lines of action to eruption.  The everlasting pantomime, suggested by Mrs. Warwick in her exclamation to Perry Wilkinson, is derided, not unrighteously, by our graver seniors.  They name this Art the pasture of idiots, a method for idiotizing the entire population which has taken to reading; and which soon discovers that it can write likewise, that sort of stuff at least.  The forecast may be hazarded, that if we do not speedily embrace Philosophy in fiction, the Art is doomed to extinction, under the shining multitude of its professors.  They are fast capping the candle.  Instead, therefore, of objurgating the timid intrusions of Philosophy, invoke her presence, I pray you.  History without her is the skeleton map of events:  Fiction a picture of figures modelled on no skeleton-anatomy.  But each, with Philosophy in aid, blooms, and is humanly shapely.  To demand of us truth to nature, excluding Philosophy, is really to bid a pumpkin caper.  As much as legs are wanted for the dance, Philosophy is required to make our human nature credible and acceptable.  Fiction implores you to heave a bigger breast and take her in with this heavenly preservative helpmate, her inspiration and her essence.  You have to teach your imagination of the feminine image you have set up to bend your civilized knees to, that it must temper its fastidiousness, shun the grossness of the over-dainty.  Or, to speak in the philosophic tongue, you must turn on yourself, resolutely track and seize that burrower, and scrub and cleanse him; by which process, during the course of it, you will arrive at the conception of the right heroical woman for you to worship:  and if you prove to be of some spiritual stature, you may reach to an ideal of the heroical feminine type for the worship of mankind, an image as yet in poetic outline only, on our upper skies.

’So well do we know ourselves, that we one and all determine to know a purer,’ says the heroine of my columns.  Philosophy in fiction tells, among various other matters, of the perils of this intimate acquaintance with a flattering familiar in the ’purer’—­a person who more than ceases to be of else to us after his ideal shall have led up men from their flint and arrowhead caverns to intercommunicative daylight.  For when the fictitious creature has performed that service of helping to civilize the world, it becomes the most dangerous of delusions, causing first the individual to despise the mass, and then to join the mass in crushing the individual.  Wherewith let us to our story, the froth being out of the bottle.

CHAPTER II

AN IRISH BALL