full of doubt, difficulties, defeats, disappointments, and
dangers, quite a hard enough life without their dark
countenances at my elbow, so that what I want is a
happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there at ugly
corners of my life's wayside, preaching his gospel of
quiet and contentment.

*

There is a certain critic, not indeed of execution but of
matter, whom I dare be known to set before the best: a
certain low-browed, hairy gentleman, at first a percher in
the fork of trees, next (as they relate) a dweller in
caves, and whom I think I see squatting in cave-mouths, of
a pleasant afternoon, to munch his berries--his wife, that
accomplished lady, squatting by his side: his name I never
heard, but he is often described as Probably Arboreal,
which may serve for recognition. Each has his own tree of
ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal;
in all our veins there run some minims of his old, wild,
tree-top blood; our civilised nerves still tingle with his
rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have
moved our common ancestors, all must obediently thrill.

*

This is an age when genealogy has taken a new lease of
life, and become for the first time a human science; so
that we no longer study it in quest of the Guaith Voeths,
but to trace out some of the secrets of descent and