ery happy to print
them. This threw light on his own suspicion that he was attached to
causes that could only, in the nature of things, be unpopular. The
disagreeable editor was right about his being out of date, only he had
got the time wrong. He had come centuries too soon; he was not too old,
but too new. Such an impression, however, would not have prevented him
from going into politics, if there had been any other way to represent
constituencies than by being elected. People might be found eccentric
enough to vote for him in Mississippi, but meanwhile where should he
find the twenty-dollar greenbacks which it was his ambition to transmit
from time to time to his female relations, confined so constantly to a
farinaceous diet? It came over him with some force that his opinions
would not yield interest, and the evaporation of this pleasing
hypothesis made him feel like a man in an open boat, at sea, who should
just have parted with his last rag of canvas.

I shall not attempt a complete description of Ransom's ill-starred
views, being convinced that the reader will guess them as he goes, for
they had a frolicsome, ingenious way of peeping out of the young man's
conversation. I shall do them sufficient justice in saying that he was
by natural disposition a good deal of a stoic, and that, as the result
of a considerable intellectual experience, he was, in social and
political matters, a reactionary. I suppose he was very conceited, for
he was much addicted to judging his age. He thought it talkative,
querulous, hysterical, maudlin, full of false ideas, of unhealthy germs,
of extravagant, dissipated habits, for which a great reckoning was in
store. He was an immense admirer of the late Thomas Carlyle, and was
very suspicious of the encroachments of modern democracy. I know not
exactly how these queer heresies had planted themselves, but he had a
longish pedigree (it had flowered at one time with English royalists and
cavaliers), and he seemed at moments to be inhabited by some transmitted
spirit of a robust but narrow ancestor, some broad-faced wig-wearer or
sword-bearer, with a more primitive conception of manhood than our
modern temperament appears to require, and a programme of human felicity
much less varied. He liked his pedigree, he revered his forefathers, and
he rather pitied those who might come after him. In saying so, however,
I betray him a little, for he never mentioned such feelings as these.
Though he thoug