it is perhaps more genuinely earnest and interesting
than in any other time or place.

The next day, as Kennedy was sitting in Julian's rooms, glancing over
the Aeschylus with him, in strutted Hazlet, whom we have incidentally
mentioned as having been the son of a widow lady living at Ildown. He
had come up to Camford straight from home, and as he had only received a
home-education everything was strangely bewildering to him, and Julian
was almost the only friend he knew. Nor was he likely to attract many
friends; his manner was strangely self-confident, and his language
dictatorial and dogmatic. In his mother's house he had long been the
centre of religious tea-parties, before which he was often called upon
to read and even to expound the Scriptures. "At the tip of his subduing
tongue" were a number of fantastic phrases, originally misapplied, and
long since worn bare of meaning, and the test of his orthodoxy was the
universality with which he could reiterate proofs of heresy against
every man of genius, honesty, and depth--who loved truth better than he
loved the oracles of the prevalent idols. Hazlet practised the duty of
Christian charity by dealing indiscriminate condemnation against all
except those who belonged to his own exclusive and somewhat ignorant
school of religious intolerance. His face was the reflex of his mind;
his lank black hair stuck down in stiff dry straightness over a
contracted forehead and an ill-shaped head; his spectacles gave
additional glassiness to a lack-lustre eye, and the manner in which he
carried his chin in the air seemed like an acted representation of "I am
holier than thou."

Far be it from me to hold up to ridicule any body of earnest and honest
men, to whatever party they may belong. I am writing of Hazlet, not of
those who hold the same opinions as he did. That man must have been
unfortunate in life who has not many friends, and friends whom he holds
in deep affection, among the adherents of opinions most entirely
antagonistic to his own. Hazlet's repulsiveness was due to a very
mistaken education, developing a very foolish idiosyncrasy, and
especially to the pernicious system of encouraging sentiments and
expressions which in a boy's mind _could_ not be other than sickly
exotics. He had to be taught his own hypocrisy by the painful progress
of events, and, above all, he had to learn that religious shibboleths
may be no proof of sanctification, and that religious in