ly, by our graver seniors. They name this Art
the pasture of idiots, a method for idiotizing the entire population
which has taken to reading; and which soon discovers that it can write
likewise, that sort of stuff at least. The forecast may be hazarded,
that if we do not speedily embrace Philosophy in fiction, the Art is
doomed to extinction, under the shining multitude of its professors.
They are fast capping the candle. Instead, therefore, of objurgating the
timid intrusions of Philosophy, invoke her presence, I pray you. History
without her is the skeleton map of events: Fiction a picture of figures
modelled on no skeleton-anatomy. But each, with Philosophy in aid,
blooms, and is humanly shapely. To demand of us truth to nature,
excluding Philosophy, is really to bid a pumpkin caper. As much as
legs are wanted for the dance, Philosophy is required to make our human
nature credible and acceptable. Fiction implores you to heave a bigger
breast and take her in with this heavenly preservative helpmate, her
inspiration and her essence. You have to teach your imagination of the
feminine image you have set up to bend your civilized knees to, that it
must temper its fastidiousness, shun the grossness of the over-dainty.
Or, to speak in the philosophic tongue, you must turn on yourself,
resolutely track and seize that burrower, and scrub and cleanse him;
by which process, during the course of it, you will arrive at the
conception of the right heroical woman for you to worship: and if you
prove to be of some spiritual stature, you may reach to an ideal of the
heroical feminine type for the worship of mankind, an image as yet in
poetic outline only, on our upper skies.

'So well do we know ourselves, that we one and all determine to know
a purer,' says the heroine of my columns. Philosophy in fiction tells,
among various other matters, of the perils of this intimate acquaintance
with a flattering familiar in the 'purer'--a person who more than ceases
to be of else to us after his ideal shall have led up men from their
flint and arrowhead caverns to intercommunicative daylight. For when the
fictitious creature has performed that service of helping to civilize
the world, it becomes the most dangerous of delusions, causing first the
individual to despise the mass, and then to join the mass in crushing
the individual. Wherewith let us to our story, the froth being out of
the bottle.

CHAPTER II. AN IRISH BALL. In the Assemb