tion, a scavenger or a sewer-cleaner, or, better still,
penned in the body of some absurd and inefficient animal, a slug or a
jelly-fish, where he might learn to be passive and contemptible.

Meanwhile it is true, of course, that the most detestable people
generally do improve upon acquaintance. I have seldom spent any length
of time in the enforced society of a disagreeable person without
finding that I liked him better at the end than at the beginning. Very
often one finds that the disagreeable qualities are used as a sort of
defensive panoply, and that they are the result, to a certain extent,
of unhappy experiences. Since I met our friend I have learnt a fact
about him, which makes me view him in a somewhat different light, I
have discovered that he was bullied at school. I am inclined to believe
that his fondness for bullying other people is mainly the result of
this, and that it arises partly from a rooted belief that other people
are malevolent, and that the only method is to exhibit his own spines;
partly also from a perverted sense of justice; on the ground that, as
he had to bear undeserved persecution in the days when he was
defenceless, it is but just that others should bear it in their turn.
He is like the cabin-boy Ransome in _Kidnapped_, who, being treated
with the grossest brutality by the officers, kept a rope's end of his
own to wallop the little ones with. I do not say that this is a
generous or high-hearted view of life. It would be better if he could
say _Miseris succurrere disco_. What he rather says, to parody the
words of the hermit in _Edwin and Angelina_, is--

"The flocks that range the valley free,
To slaughter I condemn;
Taught by the Power that bullies me,
I learn to bully them."

It is a poor consolation to say that the man who is not loved is
miserable. He is, if he desires to be loved and cannot attain it; if he
says, as Hazlitt said, "I cannot make out why everybody should dislike
me so." But if he does not want love in the least, while he gets what
he does desire--money, a place in the world, influence of a sort--then
he is not miserable at all, and it is idle to pretend that he is.

But if, as I say, one is condemned to the society of a disagreeable
person, it generally happens that on his discovering one to be harmless
and friendly he will furl his spines and become, if not an animal that
one can safely stroke, at least an animal whose proximity it is not
nec