delivery of a censor, generally an undoer of things. Our Optimy has his
instinct to tell him of the cast of Pessimy's countenance at the
confession of a dilemma-foreseen! He hands himself to Pessimy, as it
were a sugar-cane, for the sour brute to suck the sugar and whack with
the wood. But he cannot perform his part in return; he gets no
compensation: Pessimy is invulnerable. You waste your time in hurling a
common 'tu-quoque' at one who hugs the worst.

The three walking in the park, with their bright view, and black view,
and neutral view of life, were a comical trio. They had come upon the
days of the unfanned electric furnace, proper to London's early August
when it is not pipeing March. Victor complacently bore heat as well as
cold: but young Dudley was a drought, and Colney a drug to refresh it;
and why was he stewing in London? It was for this young Dudley, who
resembled a London of the sparrowy roadways and wearisome pavements and
blocks of fortress mansions, by chance a water-cart spirting a stale
water: or a London of the farewell dinner-parties, where London's
professed anecdotist lays the dust with his ten times told: Why was not
Nataly relieved of her dreary round of the purchases of furniture! They
ought all now to be in Switzerland or Tyrol. Nesta had of late been
turning over leaves of an Illustrated book of Tyrol, dear to her after a
run through the Innthal to the Dolomites one splendid August; and she and
Nataly had read there of Hofer, Speckbacker, Haspinger; and wrath had
filled them at the meanness of the Corsican, who posed after it as victim
on St. Helena's rock; the scene in grey dawn on Mantua's fortress-walls
blasting him in the Courts of History, when he strikes for his pathetic
sublime.

Victor remembered how he had been rhetorical, as the mouthpiece of his
darlings. But he had in memory prominently now the many glorious