Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/68



When there is nothing living but thee, thou shalt be welcome. I had rather be a beggar's dog, than Apemantus.

Thou art the cap of all the fools alive.

Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon.

A plague on thee, thou art too bad to curse.

Away, thou issue of a mangy dog! Choler does kill me, that thou art alive; I swoon to see thee.

Beast!

Slave!

Toad!

Rogue, rogue, rogue!

So people who never know "the middle of humanity," but "the extremity of both ends," batter each other's virtue out of shape and capacity to be recognized.

Julian Hawthorne likens the cynic to a chimney-*sweeper, "that eccentric misanthrope who vents his spite against the race by plucking defilement from the very flame which makes bright the household hearth."

But Jaques was expressly plunged into social estimates and manners that he may be withdrawn from them in a less splenetic temper. The wild crab has sunned itself in orchards, and, nodding among mellower branches, is not all flavored with their rottenness. So far from secluding himself in the conceited fashion of all hermits from the manifold culture of life, he has expended himself upon every phase of it, and withdraws with the pensiveness of satiety toning the sharpness of experience in his speech. Some men turn cynics when the first serious disappointment of their lives drifts over them. Of a sudden the whole, nature is drenched from the leaden cloud. The revulsion from a sunny day to this pitiless blackening of heaven chills the very marrow of their