dislike of other women's charms, to the degree that herbal anchorites
positively could not be colder, could not be chaster: and he no forest
bird, but having the garden of the variety of fairest flowers at nod and
blush about him! That was the truth. Even Henrietta's beauty had the
effect of a princess's birthday doll admired on show by a contemptuous
boy.

Wherefore, then, did the devil in him seek to pervert this loveliest of
young women and feed on her humiliation for one flashing minute? The
taste had gone, the desire of the vengeance was extinct, personal
gratification could not exist. He spied into himself, and set it down to
one among the many mysteries.

Men uninstructed in analysis of motives arrive at this dangerous
conclusion, which spares their pride and caresses their indolence, while
it flatters the sense of internal vastness, and invites to headlong
intoxication. It allows them to think they are of such a compound, and
must necessarily act in that manner. They are not taught at the schools
or by the books of the honoured places in the libraries, to examine and
see the simplicity of these mysteries, which it would be here and there a
saving grace for them to see; as the minstrel, dutifully inclining to the
prosy in their behalf and morality's, should exhibit; he should arrest
all the characters of his drama to spring it to vision and strike
perchance the chord primarily if not continually moving them, that
readers might learn the why and how of a germ of evil, its flourishing
under rebuke, the persistency of it after the fell creative energy has
expired and pleasure sunk to be a phlegmatic dislike, almost a loathing.

This would here be done, but for signs of a barometric dead fall in Dame
Gossip's chaps, already heavily pendent. She would be off with us on one