the Book of Egoism, and it is a book full of the world's wisdom. So
full of it, and of such dimensions is this book, in which the
generations have written ever since they took to writing, that to be
profitable to us the Book needs a powerful compression.

Who, says the notable humourist, in allusion to this Book, who can
studiously travel through sheets of leaves now capable of a stretch
from the Lizard to the last few poor pulmonary snips and shreds of
leagues dancing on their toes for cold, explorers tell us, and catching
breath by good luck, like dogs at bones about a table, on the edge of
the Pole? Inordinate unvaried length, sheer longinquity, staggers the
heart, ages the very heart of us at a view. And how if we manage
finally to print one of our pages on the crow-scalp of that solitary
majestic outsider? We may get him into the Book; yet the knowledge we
want will not be more present with us than it was when the chapters
hung their end over the cliff you ken of at Dover, where sits our great
lord and master contemplating the seas without upon the reflex of that
within!

In other words, as I venture to translate him (humourists are
difficult: it is a piece of their humour to puzzle our wits), the
inward mirror, the embracing and condensing spirit, is required to give
us those interminable milepost piles of matter (extending well-nigh to
the very Pole) in essence, in chosen samples, digestibly. I conceive
him to indicate that the realistic method of a conscientious
transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible,
is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and that
prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an
undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady. We
have the malady, whatever may be the cure or the cause. We drove in a