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208 merely, or that the former at any rate—for most virtuous persons sin pettily—may be advancing more quickly than the latter? I feel sure of it myself.

"My dukedom," however (if I had one), "to a beggarly denier," that said virtuous person would think very differently—which makes him, perchance, just a little more but one of the "fools" on "this great stage," where there are so many.

It might well be argued, I think—at any rate, I have seen many such arguments—that Shakespeare, in the lines I have quoted, intended to convey all this, in which case I have his great authority to shelter under. Goethe, however—at least, I am told so—supports me, if not more plainly, yet more categorically. He thought—or somebody, perhaps Eckermann, thought he thought—that we became good by sinning out our evil, and that evil still in us, in the shape of desire, was like prurient matter which ought to be discharged, and, at some time, would have to be, to the consequent benefit of the constitution. Given, as I say, a continuance of life and advance—I cannot, for myself, imagine the one without the other—there seems to me much force in this doctrine, and I commend it—as that sort of physic which Lady Macbeth so much needed—to the members of any cabinet that has made any war, and to politicians and millionaires generally, and to South African millionaires in particular.

All this must be the effect of lumbago, which is the effect of the Shetlands; but let me shake it off. The chick has been fed once, but I was taken by surprise,