nd so punishable, if the
sleeper could not give a satisfactory account of himself--a thing which
Papaverius never could give under any circumstances. After all, I fear
this is an attempt to describe the indescribable. It was the commonest
of sayings when any of his friends were mentioning to each other "his
last," and creating mutual shrugs of astonishment, that, were one to
attempt to tell all about him, no man would believe it, so separate
would the whole be from all the normal conditions of human nature.

The difficulty becomes more inextricable in passing from specific little
incidents to an estimation of the general nature of the man. The
logicians lucidly describe definition as being _per genus et
differentiam_. You have the characteristics in which all of the _genus_
partake as common ground, and then you individualise your object by
showing in what it differs from the others of the genus. But we are
denied this standard for Papaverius, so entirely did he stand apart,
divested of the ordinary characteristics of social man--of those
characteristics without which the human race as a body could not get on
or exist. For instance, those who knew him a little might call him a
loose man in money matters; those who knew him closer laughed at the
idea of coupling any notion of pecuniary or other like responsibility
with his nature. You might as well attack the character of the
nightingale, which may have nipped up your five-pound note and torn it
to shreds to serve as nest-building material. Only immediate craving
necessities could ever extract from him an acknowledgment of the common
vulgar agencies by which men subsist in civilised society; and only
while the necessity lasted did the acknowledgment exist. Take just one
example, which will render this clearer than any generalities. He
arrives very late at a friend's door, and on gaining admission--a
process in which he often endured impediments--he represents, with his
usual silver voice and measured rhetoric, the absolute necessity of his
being then and there invested with a sum of money in the current coin of
the realm--the amount limited, from the nature of his necessities, which
he very freely states, to seven shillings and sixpence. Discovering, or
fancying he discovers, signs that his eloquence is likely to be
unproductive, he is fortunately reminded that, should there be any
difficulty in connection with security for the repayment of the loan, he
is at that moment