Widesworth. Professor Owlsdarck had kindly come over from Wrexford to
help fill up the rooms; but the pressure of his ponderous attainments
seemed only to compress yet more that handful of miscellaneous
miserables in the front-parlor. Eight or ten elderly people, one or two
undergraduates at home for the college-vacation,--these were the guests.
The precautions of Mrs. Romulus had not been taken in vain,--there could
be no singing: none, unless--but I trust that this evil suggestion
occurred to nobody--we were so lost to shame as to call upon the
college-boys to supply the place of our absent psalmody with some of
those Bacchanalian choruses with which they were doubtless too familiar.
We felt rather wicked. We knew that we were stigmatized by that terrible
compound, "_Pro-Rum_"; we were held up as the respectable abettors of
drunkenness, the _dilettanti_ patrons of pot-houses, the cold-blooded
connoisseurs in wife-beating and _delirium tremens_. That we really
appeared all this to many honest, enthusiastic people could not be
doubted.

Certain perplexing questions, which had fifty times been answered and
dismissed, were ever returning to worry the general consciousness of the
company:--Is it not best to scourge one's self along with a popular
enthusiasm, when, by many excellent methods, it would sweep society to a
definite good? Are not the ardors of the imagination better
working-powers than the cold judgments of the reason? Should we ever be
carping at controlling principles, when much of their present
manifestation seems full of active worthiness? Above all, have we not
listened to contemptible fallacies of self-indulgence and indolence, and
then cheated ourselves into believing them the sober testimonies of
conscience?

That some such melancholic refinements were restless in the brains of