pull down, his blinds to drag his curtains hastily across, to shut out the light of the sun, which seemed killing him. And then he began to walk up and down, up and down the room, like a wild beast in his den. His fists were clenched, his arms crossed tightly over his breast, his head bent down, his face towards the earth. Oh the thunder-cloud that was upon his brow! A contest the most violent was raging within him. An insatiable desire a rabid hunger for revenge, which words cannot describe daggers and heavyloaded sticks, and dark nights, and corners of lanes seemed to haunt his mental vision. To call his enemy to demand the satisfaction due to himself, as a gentleman, was a light, feeble measure of retribution in comparison with the vengeance for which he panted. He wanted to inflict something degrading, lowering, insulting, like that to which he had been subjected he wanted to have his adversary under his feet in the mire. out His was a fierce, violent nature. Passionate yet hard, fiery but cold fearful and painful contrasts, aggravated not softened by the education he had received under an iron father and a rigid mother; stern by nature, and fanatical through prejudice and through principle the education a Dominican inquisitor might have given in the bosom of a Protestant church; than which nothing in the form of religious teaching can perhaps be imagined more fearful. From a child his passions, which had been extraordinary in their force, had been all driven in. His tenderer feelings chilled; every softer imagination blighted. His father and mother on earth had been cold, unsympathising, and severe; and he had been taught to look upon the Universal Father as on a stern though rigidly just Ruler, sitting there in His awful infallibility amidst scenes of misery and retribution. He had learnt to reverence and to fear for this impassable justice excited his reverence but he had never been taught to love. He might be said never to have known what love was. Still he had strong principles. He had been reared in strong fixed principles, and was accustomed to obey them. What was right he did, partly from principle, partly from doggedness, partly from pride. These three were twisted as it were together in that strong cord which bound him to his duty. The savage part of his nature has had its hour. And now that whirlwind of rage and passion has passed away and then comes a sterner struggle to be gone through. As that extravagance of passion subsided, which upon such occasions lifts a man at once out of the limits of the Conventional the Conventional once more asserted its claim to be heard; and, the satisfaction which, according to the custom of the society around him, such an insult demanded, began to present itself in place of daggers, clubs, and dark lanes, as the proper vengeance to be sought. The necessity for calling him out, became the question. But to call a man out to fight a duel he had been educated to consider, and had always been accustomed to consider, as an act of cold premeditated murder; heinous in the eye of God and contemptible in that of As a deliberate flying in the face of the Lord of and a cowardly submission to the indispen as a mea Life sable and absurd constitutions of society sure at once wicked and contemptible. He would have despised himself as much for the concession to a prejudice as he would have blamed himself for the commission of a crime. And yet, in spite of all this, society is strong, though nature is strong too. A sense of public opinion, the feelings of our fellows, will, under such circumstances, make themselves felt, even with the most courageous and daring defiers of public opinion. And the desire to wipe out this stain, in the only way by which, according to the notions of the young men around him, it could be wiped out, was vehement now. This stormy contest of feelings lasted long. The intense desire to clear himself from disgrace to resume his place among his fellows. In return for the mocking laughter which still rang in his ears to confront his enemy, pistol levelled, in that dire contest wherein one of them should lie dead he or his injurer was almost overwhelming. Oh, how his soul thirsted for a meeting such as that in which either he should himself fall, closing his eyes at once upon a world which had become hateful to him or should see that wild, beautiful, and excitable being, who presented himself even now to his imagination, as if surrounded, by a sort of glory glory as of an avenging angel a something lifted above common earth and common men see that brilliant creature stretch men ed before his feet a poor heap of senseless inanimate clay. A helpless inoffensive clod whilst he himself should be restored to his place in the opinion of by having committed . What? An action which every one of those very men would know he had been driven into against his conscience, against his principles, against his opinions, against his prejudices, his often expressed opinions, his well-known principles. For had he not declared them openly hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of times? Had he not declaimed, in terms of the most bitter contempt the most biting sarcasm against the wickedness, and the folly, and the weakness nay, and the cowardice of this mode of arbitrement between man and man? Had he not declared his conviction of the wickedness of thus flying in the face of one of the very first laws imposed upon human beings, that of respecting life? Upon the folly of thus putting wrong and right, justice, and injustice, injured and injurer, against each other upon equal terms, and calling that satisfaction! Had he not harangued upon the weakness of submitting to the conventional absurdities of society, and suffering life and conscience to lie at the mercy of its preposterous arrangements? Above all, had he not exclaimed till he was hoarse against the cowardice the infamous cowardice of such a proceeding? He had pointed out, and rightly enough, but for the air of triumphant superiority which he was accustomed to assume, that no stronger proof could be given of a deficiency in all that constituted true manly strength and courage than was given by him thus become the slave of opinion. Who dare not do what he thought just dare not do what he thought right dare not resist crime, and absurdity, and folly, because he feared the eye of man. Cowardice it was, dice; what else? ay, rank, contemptible cowar - Over, and over, and over again, had he thus argued and talked. Talked till the dark blood crimsoned his sallow cheeks to the temples, till his black stern eye flashed with ominous fire. Ay, that strong bitter tongue of his had exhausted all its stores of sarcastic scorn to stigmatise the base cowardice of him who suffered himself to be driven by the world's laugh to the breaking through of his own well-known and acknowledged principles. The barrier thus presented, and which he had himself elevated between him and this satisfaction, a satisfaction which he now felt he would have given life here and life hereafter, everything on earth and everything beyond the earth to obtain he felt to be invincible. There was no such satisfaction possible for him. His principles were too well known. Often and often, in his declamatory arguments, he had been met gical as his own not with arguments strong and lofor that was impossible but in the usual manner in which the oi polloi of this world, who cannot argue, and will not be convinced, meet reasoning too strong for reply by the common reUniversity phrase wait and see, source of such, to use the then the tu quoque. 66 "Wait and see, wait till he's tried; we shall see what all these fine phrases will come to. Let him be put to proof. Let him be put to proof, and see whether he has more of this fine moral courage he pretends to than other |