things he now saw just as things,
without the smallest notion of any power in them to confer
superiority by being possessed: can a slave knight his master? The
reverend but poor Mr. Sclater was not above the foolish
consciousness of importance accruing from the refined adjuncts of a
more needy corporeal existence; his wife would have felt out of her
proper sphere had she ceased to see them around her, and would have
lost some of her aplomb; but the divine idiot Gibbie was incapable
even of the notion that they mattered a straw to the life of any
man. Indeed, to compare man with man was no habit of his; hence it
cannot be wonderful that stone hearth and steel grate, clay floor
and Brussels carpet were much the same to him. Man was the one
sacred thing. Gibbie's unconscious creed was a powerful leveller,
but it was a leveller up, not down. The heart that revered the
beggar could afford to be incapable of homage to position. His was
not one of those contemptible natures which have no reverence
because they have no aspiration, which think themselves fine because
they acknowledge nothing superior to their own essential baseness.
To Gibbie every man was better than himself. It was for him a
sudden and strange descent--from the region of poetry and closest
intercourse with the strong and gracious and vital simplicities of
Nature, human and other, to the rich commonplaces, amongst them not
a few fashionable vulgarities, of an ordinary well-appointed house,
and ordinary well-appointed people; but, however bedizened, humanity
was there; and he who does not love human more than any other nature
has not life in himself, does not carry his poetry in him, as Gibbie
did, therefore cannot find it except where it has been shown to him.
Neither was a common house like this by any means devoid of any
things to please him. If there was not the lovely homeliness of the
cottage which at once gave all it had, there was a certain
stateliness which afforded its own reception; if there was little
harmony, there were individual colours that afforded him delight--as
for instance, afterwards, the crimson covering the walls of the
dining-room, whose colour was of that soft deep-penetrable character
which a flock paper alone can carry. Then there were pictures, bad
enough most of them, no doubt, in the eyes of the critic, but
endlessly suggestive, therefore endlessly delightful to Gibbie. It
is not the man who knows most about Nature that