ried and scurried about the room hither and thither,
doing, or pretending to do many things; then, saying something about
seeing her mother, ran upstairs. Eleanor was thus left alone with
Bertie, and she hardly felt an hour fly by her. To give Bertie his
due credit, he could not have played his cards better. He did not
make love to her, nor sigh, nor look languishing, but he was amusing
and familiar, yet respectful; and when he left Eleanor at her own
door at one o'clock, which he did by the by with the assistance
of the now jealous Slope, she thought that he was one of the most
agreeable men and the Stanhopes decidedly the most agreeable family
that she had ever met.

CHAPTER XX

Mr. Arabin

The Rev. Francis Arabin, fellow of Lazarus, late professor of
poetry at Oxford, and present vicar of St. Ewold, in the diocese
of Barchester, must now be introduced personally to the reader. He
is worthy of a new volume, and as he will fill a conspicuous place
in it, it is desirable that he should be made to stand before the
reader's eye by the aid of such portraiture as the author is able
to produce.

It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or
photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men
can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with
an unerring precision of truthful description. How often does the
novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that
he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the
tablet of his brain the full character and personage of a man, and
that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetuate the
portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, and play the deuce
with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described has no
more resemblance to the man conceived than the sign-board at the
corner of the street has to the Duke of Cambridge.

And yet such mechanical descriptive skill would hardly give more
satisfaction to the reader than the skill of the photographer does to
the anxious mother desirous to possess an absolute duplicate of her
beloved child. The likeness is indeed true, but it is a dull, dead,
unfeeling, inauspicious likeness. The face is indeed there, and those
looking at it will know at once whose image it is, but the owner of
the face will not be proud of the resemblance.

There is no royal road to learning, no short cut to the acquirement
of any valuable art. Let photograph