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 Another and more passive type of the egoist is the epicurean. He asks only to have his tastes gratified, and, being devoted to material comfort, demands little of the world but material supplies. Epicurianism is marked by an indulgent good-humor so long as it is itself indulged, and when not gratified sinks into nothing worse than peevishness. Though it may be a deplorable trait, it is not a ridiculous one in itself, and is therefore satirized only when in conjunction with something that produces an incongruity. The constant stream of satire directed against the epicurean clergy, for instance, is due to the sense of an incompatibility between a profession which inculcates simplicity at least, if not actual asceticism, and a régime of sensuous indulgence. Those who are legitimately worldly, as for example the patrician triad depicted by Thackeray,—Miss Crawley, the Countess of Kew, and Madam Bernstein,—may not be admirable, but neither are they absurd.

In Adrian Harley we have the egoistic epicure in all his plump perfection. Meredith hastens, however, to exculpate the founder of the hedonistic philosophy:

"Adrian was an epicurean; one whom Epicurus would have scourged out of his garden, certainly; an epicurean of our modern notions."

The combination in him of cynic, self-pamperer, and Sir Oracle forms a type which Meredith especially delights to dishonor, because its own smugness puts a splash of