enough to cure him. It does not seem in the least
likely that if Amelie had been content to live with him as merely "in
all good, all honour" a loving and comforting sister, he would have
really been able to say, like Geraldine in Coleridge's original draft of
_Christabel_, "I'm better now."

He is, in fact, what Werther is not--though his own followers to a large
extent are--mainly if not merely a Sulky Young Man: and one cannot help
imagining that if, in pretty early days, some one had been good enough
to apply to him that Herb Pantagruelion, in form not exactly of a halter
but of a rope's end, with which O'Brien cured Peter Simple's _mal de
mer_, his _mal du siecle_ would have been cured likewise.

Of course it is possible for any one to say, "You are a Philistine and a
Vulgarian. You wish to regard life through a horse-collar," etc., etc.
But these reproaches would leave my withers quite ungalled. I think
_Ecclesiastes_ one of the very greatest books in the world's literature,
and _Hamlet_ the greatest play, with the possible exception of the
_Agamemnon_. It is the abysmal sadness quite as much as the _furor
arduus_ of Lucretius that makes me think him the mightiest of Latin
poets. I would not give the mystical melancholy of certain poems of
Donne's for half a hundred of the liveliest love-songs of the time, and
could extend the list page-long and more if it would not savour of
ostentation in more ways than one. But mere temperamental [Greek:
heolokrasia] or [Greek: kraipale] (next-day nausea), without even the
exaltation of a previous orgy to ransom it,--mere spleen and sulks and
naughty-childishness,--seem to me not great things at all. You may not
be able to help your spleen, but you can "cook" it; you may have qualm
and headache, but in work of some sort, warlike or peaceful, there is
always small beer, or brandy and soda (with even, if necessary,
capsicum or bromide), for the ailment. The Renes who can do nothing but
sulk, except when they blunder themselves and make other people
uncomfortable in attempting to do something, who "never do a [manly]
thing and never say a [kind] one," are, I confess, not to my taste.[27]

[Sidenote: _Les Natchez._]

Both these stories, as will have been seen, have a distinctly religious
element; in fact, a distinctly religious purpose. The larger
novel-romance of which they form episodes, as well as its later and
greater successor, _Les Martyrs_, increase the element in both c