f the
market-place, and shall recognise them if we meet them again. Gossipry
on this side is checked and controlled by gossipry on that; and the
nicely balanced indifferentism of men emasculate, blank of belief, who
play with the realities of life, is set forth with its superior
foolishness of wisdom. The advocacy which consists of professional
self-display is exhibited genially, humorously, an advocacy horn-eyed to
the truth of its own case, to every truth, indeed, save one--that which
commends the advocate himself, his ingenious wit, and his flowers of
rhetoric. The criminal is allowed his due portion of veracity and his
fragment of truth--"What shall a man give for his life?" He has enough
truth to enable him to fold a cloud across the light, to wrench away the
sign-posts and reverse their pointing hands, to remove the land-marks,
to set up false signal fires upon the rocks. And then are heard three
successive voices, each of which, and each in a different way, brings to
our mind the words, "But there is a spirit in man; and the inspiration
of the Almighty giveth them understanding." First the voice of the pure
passion of manhood, which is naked and unashamed; a voice terrible in
its sincerity, absolute in its abandonment to truth, prophet-like in its
carelessness of personal consequences, its carelessness of all except
the deliverance of a message--and yet withal a courtly voice, and, if it
please, ironical. It is as if Elihu the son of Barachel stood up and his
wrath were kindled: "Behold my belly is as wine which hath no vent; it
is ready to burst like new bottles. I will speak that I may be
refreshed." And yet we dare not say that Caponsacchi's truth is the
whole truth; he speaks like a man newly converted, still astonished by
the supernatural light, and inaccessible to many things visible in the
light of common day. Next, a voice from one who is human indeed "to the
red-ripe of the heart," but who is already withdrawn from all the
turbulence and turbidity of life; the voice of a woman who is still a
child; of a mother who is still virginal; of primitive instinct, which
comes from God, and spiritual desire kindled by that saintly knighthood
that had saved her; a voice from the edge of the world, where the dawn
of another world has begun to tremble and grow luminous,--uttering its
fragment of the truth. Last, the voice of old age, and authority and
matured experience, and divine illumination, old age encompassed by