eminence in virtue than the habits and arts of the existing world will
allow us to reach. Perhaps it is not paradoxical to say that we could
scarcely believe perfection in others, were not the germ of
perfectibility in our own minds! When a man has lived some years among
the actual contests of faction without imbibing the prejudice as well as
the experience, how wonderingly be smiles at his worship of former idols,
how different a colour does history wear to him, how cautious is he now
to praise, how slow to admire, how prone to cavil! Human nature has
become the human nature of art; and he estimates it not from what it
may be, but from what, in the corruptions of a semi-civilization, it is!
But in the same manner as the young student clings to the belief that the
sage or the minstrel, who has enlightened his reason or chained his
imagination, is in character as in genius elevated above the ordinary
herd, free from the passions, the frivolities, the little meannesses,
and the darkening vices which ordinary flesh is heir to, does a woman who
loves for the first time cling to the imagined excellence of him she
loves. When Evelina is so shocked at the idea of an occasional fit of
intoxication in her "noble, her unrivalled" lover, who does not
acknowledge how natural were her feelings? Had Evelina been married six
years, and the same lover, then her husband, been really guilty of what
she suspected, who does not feel that it would have been very unnatural
to have been shocked in the least at the occurrence? She would not have
loved him less, nor admired him less, nor would he have been less "the
noble and the unrivalled,"--he would have taken his glass too much, have
joked the next morning on the event, and the gentle Evelina would have
made him a cup of tea; but that which would have been a matter of
pleasantry in the husband would have been matter of damnation in a lover.
But to return to Lucy.

If it be so hard, so repellent, to believe a lover guilty even of a