undignified. And the fundamental matter which troubles him in the
skeleton is the reminder that the ground-plan of his appearance is
shamelessly grotesque. I do not know why he should object to this. He
contentedly takes his place in a world that does not pretend to be
genteel--a laughing, working, jeering world. He sees millions of animals
carrying, with quite a dandified levity, the most monstrous shapes and
appendages, the most preposterous horns, wings, and legs, when they are
necessary to utility. He sees the good temper of the frog, the
unaccountable happiness of the hippopotamus. He sees a whole universe
which is ridiculous, from the animalcule, with a head too big for its
body, up to the comet, with a tail too big for its head. But when it
comes to the delightful oddity of his own inside, his sense of humour
rather abruptly deserts him.

In the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance (which was, in certain times
and respects, a much gloomier period) this idea of the skeleton had a
vast influence in freezing the pride out of all earthly pomps and the
fragrance out of all fleeting pleasures. But it was not, surely, the
mere dread of death that did this, for these were ages in which men went
to meet death singing; it was the idea of the degradation of man in the
grinning ugliness of his structure that withered the juvenile insolence
of beauty and pride. And in this it almost assuredly did more good than
harm. There is nothing so cold or so pitiless as youth, and youth in
aristocratic stations and ages tended to an impeccable dignity, an
endless summer of success which needed to be very sharply reminded of
the scorn of the stars. It was well that such flamboyant prigs should be
convinced that one practical joke, at least, would bowl them over, that
they would fall into one grinning man-trap, and not rise again. That the
whole structure of their existence was as wholesomely ridiculous as that
of a pig or a parrot they could not be expected to realize; that birth