Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/37

Rh of a big supernal pourboire) knows a bold bad doctor who doubted that 'seeking the Lord Jesus in prayer' would 'set a broken knee.' He himself puts up with the sights and smells and the rest without any such exceptional future 'perquisites' as hers; but to the pious nurse he 'looks so coarse and so red' that, with her wonderful, sweet, womanly charitableness, she could think (admirable phrase!) 'he was one of those who would break their jests on the dead, or mangle the living dog that had loved him and fawn'd at his knee—drench'd with the hellish oorali.' And so much for men who come 'fresh from the surgery-schools of France and other lands.' A woman's-rights woman, who is also a princess and a genius ('a lovely, lordly creature,' 'fair and strong and terrible,' 'a strange poet-princess with grand imaginations,' 'the flower of womanhood,' etc.), thus again disposes off-hand of this facile subject of vivisection:

Those monstrous males that carve the living hound, And cram him with the fragments of the grave.'

And as this is all, absolutely all, that our poet says on these matters, it is to be presumed that this is all he has to say. In his later hour of senile celebrity he has done the thing over again with a virulent energy which is positively amazing. Those myopic stumblings of his manhood seem large and lucid beside the distressing mental collapse, the insane and incoherent