eaders as, from the kind of jaunty levity, or what may have
passed for such, hitherto for the most part appearing in the man with
the traveling-cap, may have been tempted into a more or less hasty
estimate of him; that such readers, when they find the same person, as
they presently will, capable of philosophic and humanitarian
discourse--no mere casual sentence or two as heretofore at times, but
solidly sustained throughout an almost entire sitting; that they may
not, like the American savan, be thereupon betrayed into any surprise
incompatible with their own good opinion of their previous penetration.

The merchant's narration being ended, the other would not deny but that
it did in some degree affect him. He hoped he was not without proper
feeling for the unfortunate man. But he begged to know in what spirit he
bore his alleged calamities. Did he despond or have confidence?

The merchant did not, perhaps, take the exact import of the last member
of the question; but answered, that, if whether the unfortunate man was
becomingly resigned under his affliction or no, was the point, he could
say for him that resigned he was, and to an exemplary degree: for not
only, so far as known, did he refrain from any one-sided reflections
upon human goodness and human justice, but there was observable in him
an air of chastened reliance, and at times tempered cheerfulness.

Upon which the other observed, that since the unfortunate man's alleged
experience could not be deemed very conciliatory towards a view of human
nature better than human nature was, it largely redounded to his
fair-mindedness, as well as piety, that under the alleged dissuasives,
apparently so, from philanthropy, he had not, in a moment of excitement,
been warped over to the ranks of the misanthropes. He doubted not,
also, that with such a man his experience would, in the end, act by a
complete and beneficent inversion, and so far from shaking his
confidence in his kind, confirm it, and rivet it. Which would the more
surely be the case, did he (the unfortunate man) at last become
satisfied (as sooner or later he probably would be) that in the
distraction of his mind his Goneril had not in all respects had fair
play. At all events, the description of the lady, charity could not but
regard as more or less exaggerated, and so far unjust. The truth
probably was that she was a wife with some blemishes mixed with some
beauties. But when the blemishes were displayed, he