his
simple life and habits gave him, and which contrasted so much with
Pen's dandy indifference of manner and faded sneer. In Warrington's very
uncouthness there was a refinement, which the other's finery lacked. In
his energy, his respect, his desire to please, his hearty laughter,
or simple confiding pathos, what a difference to Sultan Pen's yawning
sovereignty and languid acceptance of homage! What had made Pen at home
such a dandy and such a despot? The women had spoiled him, as we like
them and as they like to do. They had cloyed him with obedience, and
surfeited him with sweet respect and submission, until he grew weary
of the slaves who waited upon him, and their caresses and cajoleries
excited him no more. Abroad, he was brisk and lively, and eager and
impassioned enough--most men are so constituted and so nurtured.--Does
this, like the former sentence, run a chance of being misinterpreted,
and does any one dare to suppose that the writer would incite the women
to revolt? Nevert, by the whiskers of the Prophet again, he says. He
wears a beard, and he likes his women to be slaves. What man doesn't?
What man would be henpecked, I say? We will cut off all the heads in
Christendom or Turkeydom rather than that.

Well, then, Arthur being so languid, and indifferent, and careless about
the favours bestowed upon him, how came it that Laura should have such a
love and rapturous regard for him, that a mere inadequate expression
of it should have kept the girl talking all the way from Fairoaks to
London, as she and Helen travelled in the post-chaise? As soon as Helen
had finished one story about the dear fellow, and narrated, with a
hundred sobs and ejaculations, and looks up to heaven, some thrilling
incidents which occurred about the period when the hero was breeched,
Laura began another equally interesting and equally ornamented with
tears, and told how heroically he had a tooth out or wouldn't have it
out, or how daringly he robbed a bird's nest or how magnanimously he
spared it; or how he gave a shilling to the old woman on the common, or
went without his bread-and-butter for the beggar-boy who came into the
yard--and so on One to another the sobbing women sang laments upon their
hero, who, my worthy reader has long since perceived, is no more a hero
than one of us. Being as he was, why should a sensible girl be so fond
of him?

This point has been argued before in a previous unfortunate sentence
(which lately drew