III

Beauty, of course, is for the hero. Nevertheless, it is not always he
on whom beauty works its most conquering influence. It is the dull
commonplace man into whose slow brain she drops like a celestial light,
and burns lastingly. The poet, for instance, is a connoisseur of beauty:
to the artist she is a model. These gentlemen by much contemplation of
her charms wax critical. The days when they had hearts being gone, they
are haply divided between the blonde and the brunette; the aquiline nose
and the Proserpine; this shaped eye and that. But go about among simple
unprofessional fellows, boors, dunderheads, and here and there you shall
find some barbarous intelligence which has had just strength enough to
conceive, and has taken Beauty as its Goddess, and knows but one form
to worship, in its poor stupid fashion, and would perish for her. Nay,
more: the man would devote all his days to her, though he is dumb as a
dog. And, indeed, he is Beauty's Dog. Almost every Beauty has her Dog.
The hero possesses her; the poet proclaims her; the painter puts her
upon canvas; and the faithful Old Dog follows her: and the end of it
all is that the faithful Old Dog is her single attendant. Sir Hero
is revelling in the wars, or in Armida's bowers; Mr. Poet has spied a
wrinkle; the brush is for the rose in its season. She turns to her Old
Dog then. She hugs him; and he, who has subsisted on a bone and a pat
till there he squats decrepit, he turns his grateful old eyes up to
her, and has not a notion that she is hugging sad memories in him: Hero,
Poet, Painter, in one scrubby one! Then is she buried, and the village
hears languid howls, and there is a paragraph in the newspapers
concerning the extraordinary fidelity of an Old Dog.

Excited by suggestive recollections of Nooredeen and the Fair Persian,
and the change in the obscure monotony of his life by his having
quarters in a crack hotel, and living familiarly with West-End
people--living on the fat of the land (which forms a stout portion of an
honest youth's romance), Ripton Thompson breakfasted next morning with
his chief at half-past eight. The meal had been fixed overnight for
seven, but Ripton slept a great deal more than the nightingale, and (to
chronicle his exact state) even half-past eight rather afflicted his new
aristocratic senses and reminded him too keenly of law and bondage. He
had preferred to breakfast at Algernon's hour, who had left word for
eleven. Him, howev