your history, sir, I am entirely ignorant; and even if I were
not, I should not presume to levy a tax upon it in discussions with
you; for, however vulnerable you may possibly be, I  an
argumentum ad hominem as the weakest weapon in the armory of
dialectics--a weapon too often dipped in the  of personal
. I merely gave expression to my belief that miserable,
useless lives are sinful lives; that when God framed the world, and
called the human race into it, he made most munificent provision for
all healthful hunger, whether physical, intellectual, or moral; and
that it is a morbid, diseased, distorted nature that wears out its
allotted years on earth in bitter carping and blasphemous
wordnetdesire. The Greeks recognized this immemorial truth--
wrapped it in classic traditions, and the myth of Tantalus
constituted its swaddling-clothes. You are a scholar, Mr. Murray;
look back and analyze the derivation and significance of that fable.
Tantalus, the son of Pluto, or Wealth, was, according to Pindar, 'a
wanderer from ,' and the name represents a man abounding in
wealth, but whose wordnetdesire was so insatiable, even at the ambrosial
feast of the gods, that it ultimately doomed him to eternal
unsatisfied thirst and hunger in Tartarus.