see Kate Herbert and give her Miss Crofton's letter. In
doing so, I must needs throw off all disguises and mockeries, and be
Potts, the very creature she sneered at, the man whose mere name was
enough to suggest a vulgar life and a snob's nature! No matter
what misery it may give, I will do it manfully. _She_ may never
appreciate--the world at large may never appreciate--what noble motives
were hidden beneath these assumed natures, mere costumes as they were,
to impart more vigor and persuasiveness to sentiments which, uttered in
the undress of Potts, would have carried no convictions with them. Play
Macbeth in a paletot, perform Othello in "pegtops," and see what effect
you will produce! Well, my pretended station and rank were the mere
gauds and properties that gave force to my opinions. And now to
relinquish these, and be the actor, in the garish light of the noonday,
and a shabby-genteel coat and hat! "I will do it," muttered I,--"I will
do it, but the suffering will be intense!" When the prisoner sentenced
to a long captivity is no more addressed by his name, but simply called
No. 18, or 43, it is said that the shock seems to kill the sense of
identity with him, and that nothing more tends to that stolid air of
indifference, that hopeless inactivity of feature, so characteristic
of a prison life; in the very same way am I affected when limited to my
Potts nature, and condemned to confine myself within the narrow bounds
of that one small identity. From what Prince Max has said at the _table
d'hote_ at Bregenz, it was clear that Mrs. Keats had already learned
I was not the young prince of the House of Orleans; but, in being
disabused of one error, she seemed to have fallen into another; and
it behoved me to explain that I was not a rope-dancer or a mountebank.
"She, too, shall know me in my Potts nature," said I; "she also shall
recognize me in the 'majesty of myself.'" I was not very sure of what
that was, but found it in Hegel.

And when I have completed this task, I will throw myself like a waif
upon the waters of life. I will be that which the moment or the event
shall make me,--neither trammelled by the past nor awed by the future.
I will take the world as the drama of a day. Were men to do this, what
breadth and generosity would it impart to them! It is in self-seeking
and advancement that we narrow our faculties and imprison our natures.
A man fancies he owns a palace and a demesne, but it is the palace that