by which you can get what is best worth having in the world, and will
arrive at the exclamation "Give me money!" with the tone and gesture of
a man who both feels and knows. Then if one of his audience, not having
money, remarks that a man may have made up his mind to do without money
because he prefers something else, Mixtus is with him immediately,
cordially concurring in the supreme value of mind and genius, which
indeed make his own chief delight, in that he is able to entertain the
admirable possessors of these attributes at his own table, though not
himself reckoned among them. Yet, he will proceed to observe, there was
a time when he sacrificed his sleep to study, and even now amid the
press of business he from time to time thinks of taking up the
manuscripts which he hopes some day to complete, and is always
increasing his collection of valuable works bearing on his favourite
topics. And it is true that he has read much in certain directions, and
can remember what he has read; he knows the history and theories of
colonisation and the social condition of countries that do not at
present consume a sufficiently large share of our products and
manufactures. He continues his early habit of regarding the spread of
Christianity as a great result of our commercial intercourse with black,
brown, and yellow populations; but this is an idea not spoken of in the
sort of fashionable society that Scintilla collects round her husband's
table, and Mixtus now philosophically reflects that the cause must come
before the effect, and that the thing to be directly striven for is the
commercial intercourse, not excluding a little war if that also should
prove needful as a pioneer of Christianity. He has long been wont to
feel bashful about his former religion; as if it were an old attachment
having consequences which he did not abandon but kept in decent privacy,
his avowed objects and actual position being incompatible with their
public acknowledgment.