ncy,' 'Necessities of Party,' &c. &c.! It is not known
that the Tongue of Man is a sacred organ; that Man himself is
definable in Philosophy as an 'Incarnate _Word_;' the Word not there,
you have no Man there either, but a Phantasm instead! In this way it
is that Absurdities may live long enough,--still walking, and talking
for themselves, years and decades after the brains are quite out! How
are 'the knaves and dastards' ever to be got 'arrested' at that
rate?--

"No man in this fashionable London of yours," friend Sauerteig would
say, "speaks a plain word to me. Every man feels bound to be something
more than plain; to be pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His poor
fraction of sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that
it may prick into me;--perhaps (this is the commonest) to be
topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember it the
better! Such grinning inanity is very sad to the soul of man. Human
faces should not grin on one like masks; they should look on one like
faces! I love honest laughter, as I do sunlight; but not dishonest:
most kinds of dancing too; but the St. Vitus kind not at all! A
fashionable wit, _ach Himmel_! if you ask, Which, he or a
Death's-head, will be the cheerier company for me? pray send _not_
him!"

Insincere Speech, truly, is the prime material of insincere Action.
Action hangs, as it were, _dissolved_ in Speech, in Thought whereof
Speech is the Shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of
Speech in a man betokens the kind of Action you will get from him. Our
Speech, in these modern days, has become amazing. Johnson complained,
"Nobody speaks in earnest, Sir; there is no serious conversation." To
us all serious speech of men, as that of Seventeenth-Century Puritans,
Twelfth-Century Catholics, German Poets of this Century, has become
jargon, more or less insane. Cromwell was mad and a quack; Anselm,
Becket, Goethe, _ditto ditto_.

Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology are more significant
than that Moslem one, of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A
tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same Asphaltic Lake; and
having forgotten, as we are all too prone to do, the inner facts of
Nature, and taken up with the falsities and outer semblances of it,
were fallen into sad conditions,--verging indeed towards a certain far
deeper Lake. Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the Prophet
Moses, with an instructive word of warning, out o