as
possible called upon to flourish. This last luxury therefore quite
failed us, and we understood no whit the less what was suggested and
expected because of the highly liberal way in which the pill, if I may
call it so, was gilded: it had been made up--to emphasise my image--in
so bright an air of humanity and gaiety, of charity and humour. What I
speak of is the medium itself, of course, that we were most immediately
steeped in--I am glancing now at no particular turn of our young
attitude in it, and I can scarce sufficiently express how little it
could have conduced to the formation of prigs. Our father's prime
horror was of _them_--he only cared for virtue that was more or less
ashamed of itself; and nothing could have been of a happier whimsicality
than the mixture in him, and in all his walk and conversation, of the
strongest instinct for the human and the liveliest reaction from the
literal. The literal played in our education as small a part as it
perhaps ever played in any, and we wholesomely breathed inconsistency
and ate and drank contradictions. The presence of paradox was so bright
among us--though fluttering ever with as light a wing and as short a
flight as need have been--that we fairly grew used to allow, from an
early time, for the so many and odd declarations we heard launched, to
the extent of happily "discounting" them; the moral of all of which was
that we need never fear not to be good enough if we were only social
enough: a splendid meaning indeed being attached to the latter term.

Thus we had ever the amusement, since I can really call it nothing less,
of hearing morality, or moralism, as it was more invidiously worded,
made hay of in the very interest of character and conduct; these things
suffering much, it seemed, by their association with the
conscience--that is the _conscious_ conscience--the very home of the
literal, the haunt of so many pedantries. Pedantries, on all this
ground, were anathema; and if our dear parent had at all minded his not
being consistent, and had entertained about us generally less
passionate an optimism (not an easy but an arduous state in him
moreover,) he might have found it difficult to apply to the promotion of
our studies so free a suspicion of the inhumanity of Method. Method
certainly never quite raged among us; but it was our fortune
nevertheless that everything had its turn, and that such indifferences
were no more pedantic than certain rigours might perh