five-and-twenty, and who is morally about fifty years older than a
healthy man of sixty,--imagine him with the brain of age and the
flower of youth; with a heart absorbed into the brain, and giving warm
blood to frigid ideas: a man who sneers at everything I call lofty,
yet would do nothing that he thinks mean; to whom vice and virtue are
as indifferent as they were to the Aesthetics of Goethe; who would
never jeopardize his career as a practical reasoner by an imprudent
virtue, and never sully his reputation by a degrading vice. Imagine
this man with an intellect keen, strong, ready, unscrupulous,
dauntless,--all cleverness and no genius. Imagine this man, and then
do not be astonished when I tell you he is a Chillingly.

The Chillingly race culminates in him, and becomes Chillinglyest. In
fact, it seems to me that we live in a day precisely suited to the
Chillingly idiosyncrasies. During the ten centuries or more that our
race has held local habitation and a name, it has been as airy
nothings. Its representatives lived in hot-blooded times, and were
compelled to skulk in still water with their emblematic daces. But
the times now, my dear father, are so cold-blooded that you can't be
too cold-blooded to prosper. What could Chillingly Mivers have been
in an age when people cared twopence-halfpenny about their religious
creeds, and their political parties deemed their cause was sacred and
their leaders were heroes? Chillingly Mivers would not have found
five subscribers to "The Londoner." But now "The Londoner" is the
favourite organ of the intellectual public; it sneers away all the
foundations of the social system, without an attempt at
reconstruction; and every new journal set up, if it keep its head
above water, models itself on "The Londoner." Chillingly Mivers is a
great man, and the most potent writer of the age, though nobody knows
what he has written. Chillingly Gordon is a still more notable