Another occasional visitor, much more to Mr Glowry's taste, was Mr
Flosky,[1] a very lachrymose and morbid gentleman, of some note in
the literary world, but in his own estimation of much more merit than
name. The part of his character which recommended him to Mr Glowry,
was his very fine sense of the grim and the tearful. No one could
relate a dismal story with so many minutiae of supererogatory
wretchedness. No one could call up a _raw-head and bloody-bones_ with
so many adjuncts and circumstances of ghastliness. Mystery was his
mental element. He lived in the midst of that visionary world in which
nothing is but what is not. He dreamed with his eyes open, and saw
ghosts dancing round him at noontide. He had been in his youth
an enthusiast for liberty, and had hailed the dawn of the French
Revolution as the promise of a day that was to banish war and slavery,
and every form of vice and misery, from the face of the earth. Because
all this was not done, he deduced that nothing was done; and from this
deduction, according to his system of logic, he drew a conclusion
that worse than nothing was done; that the overthrow of the feudal
fortresses of tyranny and superstition was the greatest calamity that
had ever befallen mankind; and that their only hope now was to rake
the rubbish together, and rebuild it without any of those loopholes
by which the light had originally crept in. To qualify himself for a
coadjutor in this laudable task, he plunged into the central
opacity of Kantian metaphysics, and lay _perdu_ several years in
transcendental darkness, till the common daylight of common sense
became intolerable to his eyes. He called the sun an _ignis fatuus_;
and exhorted all who would listen to his friendly voice, which were
about as many as called 'God save King Richard,' to shelter themselves
from its delusive radiance in the obscure haunt of Old Philosophy.
This word Old had great charms for him. The good old times were always
on his lips; meaning the days when polemic theology was in its prime,