out in one place, raising it in
another--now thirty feet high, now twenty feet deep; made wooden
aqueducts high in air; and at different points constructed eight hundred
bridges of stone, bricks, and timber. One fine morning the river entered
London, which was short of water. Ursus transformed all these vulgar
details into a fine Eclogue between the Thames and the New River, in
which the former invited the latter to come to him, and offered her his
bed, saying, "I am too old to please women, but I am rich enough to pay
them"--an ingenious and gallant conceit to indicate how Sir Hugh
Middleton had completed the work at his own expense.

Ursus was great in soliloquy. Of a disposition at once unsociable and
talkative, desiring to see no one, yet wishing to converse with some
one, he got out of the difficulty by talking to himself. Any one who has
lived a solitary life knows how deeply seated monologue is in one's
nature. Speech imprisoned frets to find a vent. To harangue space is an
outlet. To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue
with the divinity which is within. It was, as is well known, a custom of
Socrates; he declaimed to himself. Luther did the same. Ursus took after
those great men. He had the hermaphrodite faculty of being his own
audience. He questioned himself, answered himself, praised himself,
blamed himself. You heard him in the street soliloquizing in his van.
The passers-by, who have their own way of appreciating clever people,
used to say: He is an idiot. As we have just observed, he abused himself
at times; but there were times also when he rendered himself justice.
One day, in one of these allocutions addressed to himself, he was heard
to cry out, "I have studied vegetation in all its mysteries--in the
stalk, in the bud, in the sepal, in the stamen, in the carpel, in the
ovule, in the spore, in the theca, and in the apothecium. I have
thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy--that is to say, the
formation of colours, of smell, and of taste." There was something
fatuous, doubtless, in this certificate which Ursus gave to Ursus; but
let those who have not thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy
cast the first stone at him.

Fortunately Ursus had never gone into the Low Countries; there they
would certainly have weighed him, to ascertain whether he was of the
normal weight, above or below which a man is a sorcerer. In Holland this
weight was sagely fixed by law. N