ovelty, and of mixing with people who could
really talk and think, and who freely spoke out whatever was in them,
right or wrong, in language which at least sounded grand and deep, he
began to find in the literary world about the same satisfaction for
his inner life which he would have found in the sporting world, or the
commercial world, or the religious world, or the fashionable world, or
any other world and to suspect strongly that wheresoever a world is,
the flesh and the devil are not very far off. Tired of talking when
he wanted to think, of asserting when he wanted to discover, and
of hearing his neighbours do the same; tired of little meannesses,
envyings, intrigues, jobberies (for the literary world, too, has
its jobs), he had been for some time withdrawing himself from the
Hatchgoose soirees into his own thoughts, when his "Soul's Agonies"
appeared, and he found himself, if not a lion, at least a lion's cub.

There is a house or two in Town where you may meet on certain
evenings, everybody; where duchesses and unfledged poets, bishops and
red republican refugees, fox-hunting noblemen and briefless barristers
who have taken to politics, are jumbled together for a couple of
hours, to make what they can out of each other, to the exceeding
benefit of them all. For each and every one of them finds his
neighbour a pleasanter person than he expected; and none need leave
those rooms without knowing something more than he did when he came
in, and taking an interest in some human being who may need that
interest. To one of these houses, no matter which, Elsley was invited
on the strength of the "Soul's Agonies;" found himself, for the first
time, face to face with high-bred Englishwomen; and fancied--small
blame to him--that he was come to the mountains of the Peris, and to
Fairy Land itself. He had been flattered already: but never with such
grace, such sympathy, or such seeming understanding; for there are few
high-bred women who cannot seem to understand, and delude a hapless
genius into a belief in their own surpassing brilliance and
penetration, while they are cunningly retailing again to him the
thoughts which they have caught up from the man to whom they spoke
last; perhaps--for this is the very triumph of their art--from the
very man to whom they are speaking. Small blame to bashful, clumsy
John Briggs, if he did not know his own children; and could not
recognise his own stammered and fragmentary fancies, when t