rself against whom she
protested. Passions it is, human passions, intermingling with the wrong
itself that envenom the sense of wrong. We have ourselves been caned
severely in passing through a wood by the rebound, the recalcitration we
may call it, of elastic branches which we had displaced. And passing
through the same wood with a Whitehaven dandy of sixty, now in _Hades_,
who happened to wear a beautiful wig from which on account of the heat
he had removed his hat, we saw with these eyes of ours one of those same
thickets which heretofore had been concerned in our own caning,
deliberately lift up, suspend, and keep dangling in the air for the
contempt of the public that auburn wig which was presumed by its wearer
to be simular of native curls. The ugliness of that death's head which
by this means was suddenly exposed to daylight, the hideousness of that
grinning skull so abruptly revealed, may be imagined by poets. Neither
was the affair easily redressed: the wig swung buoyantly in the playful
breezes: to catch it was hard, to release it without injuring the
tresses was a matter of nicety: ladies were heard approaching from Rydal
Mount: the dandy was agitated: he felt himself, if seen in this
condition, to be a mere _memento mori_: for the first time in his life,
as we believe, he blushed on meeting our eye: he muttered something, in
which we could only catch the word 'Absalom': and finally we extricated
ourselves from the cursed thicket barely in time to meet the ladies.
Here were insufferable affronts: greater cannot be imagined: wanton
outrages on two inoffensive men: and for ourselves, who could have
identified and sworn to one of the bushes as an accomplice in _both_
assaults, it was not easy altogether to dismiss the idea of malice. Yet,
because this malice did not organize and concentrate itself in an eye
looking on and genially enjoying our several mortifications, we both
pocketed the affronts. All this we say to show Mr. Bennett how fully we
do justice to his situation, and allow for the irritation natural to
such cases as his, where the loss is clothed with contumely, and the
wrong is barbed by malice. But, for all _that_, we do not think such
confidential communications of ill-usage properly made to the public.

In fact, this querulous temper of expostulation, running through the
book, disfigures its literary aspect. And possibly for our own comfort
we might have turned away from a feature of discontent so