heroes, guileful usurpers, persecuted discoverers,
dying deliverers: everywhere the
protagonist has a part pregnant with doom.
The comedy sinks to an accessory, and if there
are loud laughs they seem a convulsive transition
from sobs; or if the comedy is touched
with a gentle lovingness, the panoramic scene
is one where

"Sadness is a kind of mirth
So mingled as if mirth did make us sad
And sadness merry."[1]

[Footnote 1: Two Noble Kinsmen.]

But I did not set out on the wide survey that would carry me into
tragedy, and in fact had nothing more serious in my mind than certain
small chronic ailments that come of small authorship. I was thinking
principally of Vorticella, who flourished in my youth not only as a
portly lady walking in silk attire, but also as the authoress of a book
entitled 'The Channel Islands, with Notes and an Appendix.' I would by
no means make it a reproach to her that she wrote no more than one book;
on the contrary, her stopping there seems to me a laudable example. What
one would have wished, after experience, was that she had refrained from
producing even that single volume, and thus from giving her
self-importance a troublesome kind of double incorporation which became
oppressive to her acquaintances, and set up in herself one of those
slight chronic forms of disease to which I have just referred. She lived
in the considerable provincial town of Pumpiter, which had its own
newspaper press, with the usual divisions of political partisanship and