without failing miserably, and one can
only speak, and act, and write according to one's light. After all, it
seems a more uncertain science than astronomy. Comets _will_ appear, now
and then, at abnormal times, and in places where they have no heavenly
business; and people are still to be found, so very ill-regulated as to
go right or wrong in opposition to all rules and precedents. Where the
variations are so infinite, it is difficult to argue safely from one
singular example to another, and, if you miss one step, your whole
deduction is apt to come to grief. Some one said, that "there were
corners in the nature of the simplest peasant-girl to which the
cleverest man alive could never find a key." Perhaps, too, those who
fancy, rightly or wrongly, that they have mesmerized the heart even of
one fellow-creature so completely that the poor thing could not, if it
would, keep back a single secret, think it hardly fair to give the world
in general the full benefit of their discoveries. Practically, does all
this help one much? It is possible that some who have passed for the
deepest observers of human nature, owed their renown more to an acute
observation of the phenomena of feeling, an intuitive knowledge of what
people like and dislike, a retentive memory, and a happy knack of making
all these available at the right moment, than to any profound reasoning
on abstract principles. Like some untaught arithmeticians, their
calculations came out correct, but they could not have gone through the
steps of the process.

There lives, even now, a sublime theorist, who professes to have made
feminine physiology his peculiar study. Sitting at his desk, or in his
arm-chair, he will trace the motives, impulses, and sensations which a
woman must _necessarily_ have experienced under any given circumstances,
as lucidly as a skillful pathologist, scalpel in hand, may lecture on
the material mysteries of the blood or brain: he will analyze for you
the waters of the _Fons Lacrymarum_, just as Letheby or Taylor might do
those of a new chalybeate spring. A fearful power, is it not, and fatal,
if used tyrannously? Well, I remember hearing a very beautiful and
charming person speak of an evening she had spent in the society of The
Adept, during which she was conscious of being subjected to the action
of his microscope, stethoscope, and other engines of science. She said
"It did not hurt her much," and, on the whole, seemed by no means so
impres