in the pound sterling income-tax, which has just been continued for another year!  And all the time taxes on distilled spirits, on the excise of wine and beer, on tonnage and poundage, on cider, on perry, on mum, malt, and prepared barley, on coals, and on a hundred things besides.  Let us venerate things as they are.  The clergy themselves depend on the lords.  The Bishop of Man is subject to the Earl of Derby.  The lords have wild beasts of their own, which they place in their armorial bearings.  God not having made enough, they have invented others.  They have created the heraldic wild boar, who is as much above the wild boar as the wild boar is above the domestic pig and the lord is above the priest.  They have created the griffin, which is an eagle to lions, and a lion to eagles, terrifying lions by his wings, and eagles by his mane.  They have the guivre, the unicorn, the serpent, the salamander, the tarask, the dree, the dragon, and the hippogriff.  All these things, terrible to us, are to them but an ornament and an embellishment.  They have a menagerie which they call the blazon, in which unknown beasts roar.  The prodigies of the forest are nothing compared to the inventions of their pride.  Their vanity is full of phantoms which move as in a sublime night, armed with helm and cuirass, spurs on their heels and the sceptres in their hands, saying in a grave voice, ‘We are the ancestors!’ The canker-worms eat the roots, and panoplies eat the people.  Why not?  Are we to change the laws?  The peerage is part of the order of society.  Do you know that there is a duke in Scotland who can ride ninety miles without leaving his own estate?  Do you know that the Archbishop of Canterbury has a revenue of L40,000 a year?  Do you know that her Majesty has L700,000 sterling from the civil list, besides castles, forests, domains, fiefs, tenancies, freeholds, prebendaries, tithes, rent, confiscations, and fines, which bring in over a million sterling?  Those who are not satisfied are hard to please.”

“Yes,” murmured Gwynplaine sadly, “the paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.”

CHAPTER XII.

URSUS THE POET DRAGS ON URSUS THE PHILOSOPHER.

Then Dea entered.  He looked at her, and saw nothing but her.  This is love; one may be carried away for a moment by the importunity of some other idea, but the beloved one enters, and all that does not appertain to her presence immediately fades away, without her dreaming that perhaps she is effacing in us a world.

Let us mention a circumstance.  In “Chaos Vanquished,” the word monstruo, addressed to Gwynplaine, displeased Dea.  Sometimes, with the smattering of Spanish which every one knew at the period, she took it into her head to replace it by quiero, which signifies, “I wish it.”  Ursus tolerated, although not without an expression of impatience, this alteration in his text.  He might have said to Dea, as in our day Moessard said to Vissot, Tu manques de respect au repertoire.