 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 overdainty. 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 use to
us after his ideal shall have led up men from their flint and arrowhead caverns
to inter-communicative 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

In the Assembly Rooms of the capital city of the Sister Island there was a
public Ball, to celebrate the return to Erin of a British hero of Irish blood,
after his victorious Indian campaign; a mighty struggle splendidly ended; and
truly could it be said that all Erin danced to meet him; but this was the pick
of the dancing, past dispute the pick of the supping. Outside those halls the
supping was done in Lazarus fashion
