agent for a new assurance company you'd
be!" "What a success you'd have had on the stage! You'd have played Sir
Lucius better than any living actor. Why don't you go on the boards? Why
not start a penny newspaper? Why not give readings?" I wonder why they
didn't tell me to turn organist or a painter in oils.

"You're always telling us how much you know of the world, Mr O'Dowd,"
said my wife; "I wish you could turn the knowledge to some account."

This was scarcely generous, to say the least of it.

Mrs O'D. knew well that I was vain of the quality--that I regarded it
as a sort of specialty. In fact, deeming, with the poet, that the proper
study of mankind was man, I had devoted a larger share of my life to the
inquiry than quite consisted with professional advancement; and while
others pored over their Blackstone, I was "doing Baden;" and instead of
term reports and Crown cases, I was diverting myself in the Oberland or
on the Lago Maggiore.

"And with all your great knowledge of life," continued she, "I don't
exactly see what it has done for you."

Now, Mrs O'Dowd being, as you may apprehend, a woman, I didn't waste my
time in arguing with her--I didn't crush her, as I might, by telling
her that the very highest and noblest of a man's acquirements are, _ipso
facto_, the least marketable; and that the boasted excellence of all
classical education is in nothing so conspicuous as in the fact that
Greek and Latin cannot be converted into money as readily as vulgar
fractions and a bold handwriting. Being a woman, as I have observed,
Mrs O'D. would have read the argument backwards, and stood out for the
rule-of-three against Sophocles and "all his works." I simply replied,
with that dignity which is natural to me, "I _am_ proud of my knowledge
of life; I do recognise in myself the analyst of that strange mixture
that makes up human chemistry; but it has never occurred to me to
advertise my discovery for sale, like Holloway's Pills or somebody's
cod-liver oil." "Perhaps you knew nobody would buy it," cried she,
and flounced out of the room, the bang of the door being one of the
"epigrams in action" wives are skilled in.

Now, with respect to my knowledge of life, I have often compared myself
to those connoisseurs in art who, without a picture or an engraving of
their own, can roam through a gallery, taking the most intense pleasure
in all it contains, gazing with ecstasy at the Raffaeles, and lingering
delighted over th