e shuttle of intrigue; the mild hypocrisy, the clever
audacity, the suspicion confirmed, the complication threatening to
become resonant and terrible; and the old crossing the young and the
young outwitting the old, wiles of fair traitors and dark, knaves of all
suits of the pack. A more intimate acquaintance with their lineaments
inspired a regard for them, such as poets may feign the throned high
moon to entertain for objects causing her rays to flash.

The simple fools, performing in character, were a neutral people,
grotesques and arabesques wreathed about the margins of the scene. Venus
or Fortune smote them to a relievo distinguishing one from another.
Here, however, as elsewhere, the core of interest was with the serious
population, the lovers and the players in earnest, who stood round
the furnace and pitched themselves into it, not always under a
miscalculation of their chances of emerging transfigured instead of
serving for fuel. These, the tragical children of folly, were astute:
they played with lightning, and they knew the conditions of the game;
victories were to be had.

The ulterior conditions of the game, the price paid for a victory, they
thought little of: for they were feverish worshippers of the phantasmal
deity called the Present; a god reigning over the Past, appreciable only
in the Future; whose whiff of actual being is composed of the embryo
idea of the union of these two periods. Still he is occasionally a
benevolent god to the appetites; which have but to be continuous to
establish him in permanence; and as nothing in us more readily supposes
perpetuity than the appetite rushing to destroy itself, the rational
nature of the most universal worship on earth is perceived at once.

Now, the price paid for a victory is this: that having been favoured in
a single instance by the spouse of the aforesaid eminent divinity--the
Black Goddess of the golden fringes--men believe in her for ever after,
behold her everywhere, they belong to her. Their faith as to sowing and
reaping has gone; and so has their capacity to see the actual as it is:
she has the power to attach them to her skirts the more by rewarding
their impassioned devotion with cuffs and scorns. They have ceased to
have a first notion upon anything without a second haunting it, which
directs them to propitiate Fortune.

But I am reminded by the convulsions of Dame Gossip, that the wisdom of
our ancestors makes it a mere hammering of common