To illustrate this, I will urge the authority of three eminent persons, viz., S.T.  Coleridge, Aristotle, and Mr. Howship the surgeon.  To begin with S.T.C.  One night, many years ago, I was drinking tea with him in Berners’ Street, (which, by the way, for a short street, has been uncommonly fruitful in men of genius.) Others were there besides myself; and amidst some carnal considerations of tea and toast, we were all imbibing a dissertation on Plotinus from the attic lips of S.T.C.  Suddenly a cry arose of “Fire—­fire!” upon which all of us, master and disciples, Plato and [Greek:  hoi peri ton Platona], rushed out, eager for the spectacle.  The fire was in Oxford Street, at a piano-forte maker’s; and, as it promised to be a conflagration of merit, I was sorry that my engagements forced me away from Mr. Coleridge’s party before matters were come to a crisis.  Some days after, meeting with my Platonic host, I reminded him of the case, and begged to know how that very promising exhibition had terminated.  “Oh, sir,” said he, “it turned out so ill, that we damned it unanimously.”  Now, does any man suppose that Mr. Coleridge,—­who, for all he is too fat to be a person of active virtue, is undoubtedly a worthy Christian,—­that this good S. T. C., I say, was an incendiary, or capable of wishing any ill to the poor man and his piano-fortes (many of them, doubtless, with the additional keys)?  On the contrary, I know him to be that sort of man, that I durst stake my life upon it he would have worked an engine in a case of necessity, although rather of the fattest for such fiery trials of his virtue.  But how stood the case?  Virtue was in no request.  On the arrival of the fire-engines, morality had devolved wholly on the insurance office.  This being the case, he had a right to gratify his taste.  He had left his tea.  Was he to have nothing in return?

I contend that the most virtuous man, under the premises stated, was entitled to make a luxury of the fire, and to hiss it, as he would any other performance that raised expectations in the public mind, which afterwards it disappointed.  Again, to cite another great authority, what says the Stagyrite?  He (in the Fifth Book, I think it is, of his Metaphysics) describes what he calls [Greek:  kleptaen teleion], i.e., a perfect thief; and, as to Mr. Howship, in a work of his on Indigestion, he makes no scruple to talk with admiration of a certain ulcer which he had seen, and which he styles “a beautiful ulcer.”  Now will any man pretend, that, abstractedly considered, a thief could appear to Aristotle a perfect character, or that Mr. Howship could be enamored of an ulcer?  Aristotle, it is well known, was himself so very moral a character, that, not content with writing his Nichomachean Ethics, in one volume octavo, he also wrote another system, called Magna Moralia, or Big Ethics.  Now, it is impossible that a man who composes any ethics at all, big or little,