rty that is going on a sleigh-ride. Now take a poet like Cowper. He
had a mental neuralgia, a great deal worse in many respects than tic
douloureux confined to the face. It was well that he was sheltered and
relieved, by the cares of kind friends, especially those good women, from
as many of the burdens of life as they could lift off from him. I am
fair to the poets,--don't you agree that I am?

Why, yes,--I said,--you have stated the case fairly enough, a good deal
as I should have put it myself.

Now, then,--the Master continued,--I 'll tell you what is necessary to
all these artistic idiosyncrasies to bring them into good square human
relations outside of the special province where their ways differ from
those of other people. I am going to illustrate what I mean by a
comparison. I don't know, by the way, but you would be disposed to think
and perhaps call me a wine-bibber on the strength of the freedom with
which I deal with that fluid for the purposes of illustration. But I
make mighty little use of it, except as it furnishes me an image now and
then, as it did, for that matter, to the Disciples and their Master. In
my younger days they used to bring up the famous old wines, the
White-top, the Juno, the Eclipse, the Essex Junior, and the rest, in
their old cobwebbed, dusty bottles. The resurrection of one of these old
sepulchred dignitaries had something of solemnity about it; it was like
the disinterment of a king; the bringing to light of the Royal Martyr
King Charles I., for instance, that Sir Henry Halford gave such an
interesting account of. And the bottle seemed to inspire a personal
respect; it was wrapped in a napkin and borne tenderly and reverently
round to the guests, and sometimes a dead silence went before the first
gush of its amber flood, and

"The boldest held his breath
For a time."

But nowadays the precious juice of a long-dead vintage is transferred
carefully into a cut-glass decanter, and stands side by side with the
sherry from a corner grocery, which looks just as bright and apparently
thinks just as well of itself. The old historic Madeiras, which have
warmed the periods of our famous rhetoricians of the past and burned in
the impassioned eloquence of our earlier political demigods, have nothing
to mark them externally but a bit of thread, it may be, round the neck of
the decanter, or a slip of ribbon, pink on one of them and blue on
another.

Go to a London club,--p