own life, irrepressible hope in the propagation of his fanatical beliefs.
The instance was perhaps odd, exceptional in its form, but substantially it was
not rare. Fanaticism was not so common as bankruptcy, but taken in all its
aspects it was abundant enough. While Mordecai was waiting on the bridge for the
fulfilment of his visions, another man was convinced that he had the
mathematical key of the universe which would supersede Newton, and regarded all
known physicists as conspiring to stifle his discovery and keep the universe
locked; another, that he had the metaphysical key, with just that hair's-breadth
of difference from the old wards which would make it fit exactly. Scattered here
and there in every direction you might find a terrible person, with more or less
power of speech, and with an eye either glittering or preternaturally dull, on
the look-out for the man who must hear him; and in most cases he had volumes
which it was difficult to get printed, or if printed to get read. This Mordecai
happened to have a more pathetic aspect, a more passionate, penetrative speech
than was usual with such monomaniacs; he was more poetical than a social
reformer with coloured views of the new moral world in parallelograms, or than
an enthusiast in sewage; still he came under the same class. It would be only
right and kind to indulge him a little, to comfort him with such help as was
practicable; but what likelihood was there that his notions had the sort of
value he ascribed to them? In such cases a man of the world knows what to think
beforehand. And as to Mordecai's conviction that he had found a new executive
self, it might be preparing for him the worst of disappointments - that which
presents itself as final.«
    Deronda's ear caught all these negative whisperings; nay, he repeated, them
distinctly to himself. It was not the first but it was the most pressing
occasion on which he had had to face this question of the family likeness among
the heirs of enthusiasm, whether prophets or dreamers of dreams, whether the
 
»Great benefactors of mankind, deliverers,«
 
or the devotees of phantasmal discovery - from the first believer in his own
unmanifested inspiration, down to the last inventor of an ideal machine that
will achieve perpetual motion. The kinship of human passion, the sameness of
mortal scenery, inevitably fill fact with burlesque and parody. Error and folly
have had their hecatombs of martyrs. Reduce the grandest type of man hitherto
known to an abstract statement of his qualities and efforts, and he appears in
dangerous company: say