omething
he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and
digest! Lower than that he will not get. We call those ages in which
he gets so low the mournfulest, sickest and meanest of all ages. The
world's heart is palsied, sick: how can any limb of it be whole?
Genuine Acting ceases in all departments of the world's work; dexterous
Similitude of Acting begins. The world's wages are pocketed, the
world's work is not done. Heroes have gone out; Quacks have come in.
Accordingly, what Century, since the end of the Roman world, which also
was a time of scepticism, simulacra and universal decadence, so
abounds with Quacks as that Eighteenth? Consider them, with their
tumid sentimental vaporing about virtue, benevolence,--the wretched
Quack-squadron, Cagliostro at the head of them! Few men were without
quackery; they had got to consider it a necessary ingredient and amalgam
for truth. Chatham, our brave Chatham himself, comes down to the House,
all wrapt and bandaged; he "has crawled out in great bodily suffering,"
and so on;--_forgets_, says Walpole, that he is acting the sick man; in
the fire of debate, snatches his arm from the sling, and oratorically
swings and brandishes it! Chatham himself lives the strangest mimetic
life, half-hero, half-quack, all along. For indeed the world is full of
dupes; and you have to gain the _world's_ suffrage! How the duties of
the world will be done in that case, what quantities of error, which
means failure, which means sorrow and misery, to some and to many, will
gradually accumulate in all provinces of the world's business, we need
not compute.

It seems to me, you lay your finger here on the heart of the world's
maladies, when you call it a Sceptical World. An insincere world; a
godless untruth of a world! It is out of this, as I consider, that the
whole tribe of social pestilences, French Revolutions, Chartisms, and
what not, have derived their being,--their chief necessity to be. This
must alter. Till this alter, nothing can beneficially alter. My one hope
of the world, my inexpugnable consolation in looking at the miseries of
the world, is that this is altering. Here and there one does now find
a man who knows, as of old, that this world is a Truth, and no
Plausibility and Falsity; that he himself is alive, not dead or
paralytic; and that the world is alive, instinct with Godhood, beautiful
and awful, even as in the beginning of days! One man once knowing this,
man