which they had not), I not
unfrequently propounded to young ladies. Take this as a specimen: My
first raises a little hope; my second very little indeed; and my whole
is a vast roar of despair. No young lady could ever solve it; neither
could I. We all had to give it up. A charade that only needs an answer,
which, perhaps, some distant generation may supply, is but a half and
half, tentative approach to this. Very much of this nature was the
genius or Daimon (don't say _De_mon) of Socrates. How many thousands of
learned writers and printers have gone to sleep over too profound
attempts to solve _that_, which Socrates ought to have been able to
solve at sight. I am myself of opinion that it was a dram-bottle, which
someone raised a ghost to explain. Then the Entelecheia of Aristotle;
did you ever read about that, excellent reader? Most people fancy it to
have meant some unutterable crotchet in metaphysics, some horrible idea
(lest the police should be after it) without a name; that is, until the
Stagyrite repaired the injustice of his conduct by giving it a pretty
long one. My opinion now, as you are anxious to know it, is, that it was
a lady, a sweetheart of Aristotle's; for what was to hinder Aristotle
having a sweetheart? I dare say Thomas Aquinas, dry and arid as he was,
raised his unprincipled eyes to some Neapolitan beauty, began a sonnet
to some lady's eyebrow, though he might forget to finish it. And my
belief is that this lady, ambitious as Semele, wished to be introduced
as an eternal jewel into the great vault of her lover's immortal
Philosophy, which was to travel much farther and agitate far longer than
his royal pupil's conquests. Upon that Aristotle, keeping her hand,
said: 'My love, I'll think of it.' And then it occurred to him, that in
the very heavens many lovely ladies, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Ariadne,
etc., had been placed as constellations in that map which many
chronologists suppose to have been prepared for the use of the ship
_Argo_, a whole generation before the Trojan war. Berenice, though he
could not be aware of _that_, had interest even to procure a place in
that map for her ringlets; and of course for herself she might have.
Considering which, Aristotle said: 'Hang me! if I don't put her among
the ten Categories!' On after thoughts he put her higher, for an
Entelecheia is as much above a Category as our Padishah Victoria is
above a Turkish sultan. 'But now, Stag,' said the lady (privileged as