careful construction of objects which burden
life. Frankenstein was a large rather than an isolated example. The
civilized world so teems with elaborate and unlovely inutilities,
with things which seem foreign to any reasonable conditions of
existence, that we are sometimes disposed to envy the savage who
wears all his simple wardrobe without being covered, and who sees
all his simple possessions in a corner of his empty hut. What pleasant
spaces meet the savage eye! What admirable vacancies soothe the
savage soul! No embroidered bag is needed to hold his sponge or his
slippers. No painted box is destined for his postal cards. No
decorated tablet waits for his laundry list. No ornate wall-pocket
yawns for his unpaid bills. He smokes without cigarette-cases. He
dances without cotillion favours. He enjoys all rational diversions,
unfretted by the superfluities with which we have weighted them. Life,
notwithstanding its pleasures, remains endurable to him.

Above all, he does not undermine his own moral integrity by vicarious
benevolence, by helping the needy at his friend's expense. The great
principle of giving away what one does not want to keep is probably
as familiar to the savage as to his civilized, or semi-civilized
brother. That vivacious traveller, Pere Huc, tells us he has seen
a Tartar chief at dinner gravely hand over to an underling a piece
of gristle he found himself unable to masticate, and that the gift
was received with every semblance of gratitude and delight. But there
is a simple straightforwardness about an act like this which commends
it to our understanding. The Tartar did not assume the gristle to
be palatable. He did not veil his motives for parting with it. He
did not expand with the emotions of a philanthropist. And he did not
expect the Heavens to smile upon his deed.

One word must be said in behalf of the punctilious giver, of the man
who repays a gift as scrupulously as he returns a blow. He wants to
please, but he is baffled by not knowing, and by not being sympathetic
enough to divine, what his inarticulate friend desires. And if he
does know, he may still vacillate between his friend's sense of the
becoming and his own. The "Spectator," in a mood of unwonted subtlety,
tells us that there is a "mild treachery" in giving what we feel to
be bad, because we are aware that the recipient will think it very
good. If, for example, we hold garnets to be ugly and vulgar, we must
not send them to