ned to itself. The character sheds not its characteristic
on its surroundings, whereas, the original character, essentially such,
is like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all round
it--everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark how it is
with Hamlet), so that, in certain minds, there follows upon the adequate
conception of such a character, an effect, in its way, akin to that
which in Genesis attends upon the beginning of things.

For much the same reason that there is but one planet to one orbit, so
can there be but one such original character to one work of invention.
Two would conflict to chaos. In this view, to say that there are more
than one to a book, is good presumption there is none at all. But for
new, singular, striking, odd, eccentric, and all sorts of entertaining
and instructive characters, a good fiction may be full of them. To
produce such characters, an author, beside other things, must have seen
much, and seen through much: to produce but one original character, he
must have had much luck.

There would seem but one point in common between this sort of phenomenon
in fiction and all other sorts: it cannot be born in the author's
imagination--it being as true in literature as in zoology, that all life
is from the egg.

In the endeavor to show, if possible, the impropriety of the phrase,
_Quite an Original_, as applied by the barber's friends, we have, at
unawares, been led into a dissertation bordering upon the prosy, perhaps
upon the smoky. If so, the best use the smoke can be turned to, will be,
by retiring under cover of it, in good trim as may be, to the story.

CHAPTER XLV.

THE COSMOPOLITAN INCREASES IN SERIOUSNESS.

In the middle of the gentleman's cabin burned a solar lamp, swung from
the ceiling, and whose shade of ground glass was all round fancifully
variegated, in transparency, with the image of a horned altar, from
which flames rose, alternate with the figure of a robed man, his head
encircled by a halo. The light of this lamp, after dazzlingly striking
on marble, snow-white and round--the slab of a centre-table beneath--on
all sides went rippling off with ever-diminishing distinctness, till,
like circles from a stone dropped in water, the rays died dimly away in
the furthest nook of the place.

Here and there, true to their place, but not to their function, swung
other lamps, barren planets, which had either gone out from exhaustion,
or been