ecstacies. I might grow rich, meseems, were I to let myself be stared
at for money while I stay here; and if I chance to give them all this
pleasure gratis, forthwith a pack of blockheads begin barking and
hallooing at my tail. To see a long-tailed monkey, apes or seals, the
dogs must put themselves to some expense; yet instead of enjoying my
magnanimity quietly and like sensible people, they rave and revile me
all round, and hunt for every expression of loathing they can root out
of the animal creation, to display their gross ignorance."

"Very true! very true!" sighed the old woman: "it fares no better with
me. Are the beasts such sheer fools then? Only let a body have a
regular, average, commonplace nose, eyes, and chin, and all goes on
quietly."

"Look at the fish," continued Beresynth, "who are dunces in many
things. What philosophical tolerance! and yet among them many a fellow
is all snout, and confronts the learned physiognomists of the ocean
with a countenance, grave, cold, calm in the consciousness of its
originality: nay, the whole deep brims and swims with one can't count
how many eccentric faces, and gills, and teeth, and eyes astart from
their sockets, and every other kind of striking contour: but every
monster there floats his own way quietly and peaceably, without having
his sleeve twitcht or any other annoyance. Man alone is so absurd as
to laugh and sneer at his fellow creatures."

"And on what," said the beldam, "after all does this mighty difference
turn? I am sure I never yet saw a nose that was but a single yard
long: an inch, at most two, hardly ever three, make the vast
distinction between what they call monsters, and what they are pleased
in their modesty to style beauty. And now to come to a hump. If it
were not in one's way sometimes in bed, as you know, coz, it is in
itself far more agreeable to the eye than those dull flats by way of
backs, where in many a lank lathy booby the tiresome straight line
stretches up as far as one can see without a single twist, or curl, or
flourish."

"You are in the right, my dame cousin!" cried Beresynth already drunk
to his drunken hostess. "What can Nature be about when she turns off
the things they christen beauties from her pottery-wheel? Why, they
are hardly worth the trouble of setting to work at them. But such
cabinet pieces as you and I! there the creative power, or the
principle of nature, or the soul of the world, or the mundane animal,
or what