he may have cooked and eaten in this world, cannot long have any.
Some men do COOK enormously (let us call it COOKING, what a man
does in obedience to his HUNGER merely, to his desires and
passions merely),--roasting whole continents and populations,
in the flames of war or other discord;--witness the Napoleon above
spoken of. For the appetite of man in that respect is unlimited;
in truth, infinite; and the smallest of us could eat the entire
Solar System, had we the chance given, and then cry, like
Alexander of Macedon, because we had no more Solar Systems to cook
and eat. It is not the extent of the man's cookery that can much
attach me to him; but only the man himself, and what of strength
he had to wrestle with the mud-elements, and what of victory he
got for his own benefit and mine.


4. ENCOURAGEMENTS, DISCOURAGEMENTS.

French Revolution having spent itself, or sunk in France and
elsewhere to what we see, a certain curiosity reawakens as to what
of great or manful we can discover on the other side of that still
troubled atmosphere of the Present and immediate Past. Curiosity
quickened, or which should be quickened, by the great and all-
absorbing question, How is that same exploded Past ever to settle
down again? Not lost forever, it would appear: the New Era has not
annihilated the old eras: New Era could by no means manage that;--
never meant that, had it known its own mind (which it did not):
its meaning was and is, to get its own well out of them;
to readapt, in a purified shape, the old eras, and appropriate
whatever was true and NOT combustible in them: that was the poor
New Era's meaning, in the frightful explosion it made of itself