o "deceit;" and how my honest heartfelt
submission to authority had been called, as it was called in a
colonial bishop's charge, "mystic humility;" and how my silence was
called an "hypocrisy;" and my faithfulness to my clerical engagements
a secret correspondence with the enemy. And I found a way of
destroying my sensitiveness about these things which jarred upon my
sense of justice, and otherwise would have been too much for me, by
the contemplation of a large law of the Divine Dispensation, and
found myself more and more able to bear in my own person a present
trial, of which in my past writings I had expressed an anticipation.

For thus feeling and thus speaking this writer has the charitableness
and the decency to call me "Mawworm." "I found him telling
Christians," he says, "that they will always seem 'artificial,' and
'wanting in openness and manliness;' that they will always be 'a
mystery' to the world; and that the world will always think them
rogues; and bidding them glory in what the world (that is, the rest
of their fellow-countrymen) disown, and say with Mawworm, 'I like to
be despised.' ... How was I to know that the preacher ... was utterly
blind to the broad meaning and the plain practical result of a sermon
like this delivered before fanatic and hot-headed young men, who hung
upon his every word?"--p. 17. Hot-headed young men! why, man, you are
writing a romance. You think the scene is Alexandria or the Spanish
main, where you may let your imagination play revel to the extent of
inveracity. It is good luck for me that the scene of my labours was
not at Moscow or Damascus. Then I might be one of your ecclesiastical
saints, of which I sometimes hear in conversation, but with whom, I
am glad to say, I have no personal acquaintance. Then you might
ascribe to me a more deadly craft than mere quibbling and lying; in
Spain I should have been an Inquisitor, with my rack in the
background; I should have had a concealed dagger in Sicily; at Venice
I should have brewed poison; in Turkey I should have been the
Sheik-el-Islam with my bowstring; in Khorassan I should have been a
veiled prophet. "Fanatic young men!" Why he is writing out the list
of a _dramatis Personae_; "guards, conspirators, populace," and the
like. He thinks I was ever moving about with a train of Capulets at
my heels. "Hot-headed fanatics, who hung on my every word!" If he had
taken to write a history, and not a play, he would have easily found