I could not leave my companion, not from regard or even from interest, but from a very natural feeling, inseparable from the case.  To understand it, let us take a simile.  Suppose yourself walking down the street with a man who continues to sprinkle the crowd out of a flask of vitriol.  You would be much diverted with the grimaces and contortions of his victims; and at the same time you would fear to leave his arm until his bottle was empty, knowing that, when once among the crowd, you would run a good chance yourself of baptism with his biting liquor.  Now my companion’s vitriol was inexhaustible.

It was perhaps the consciousness of this, the knowledge that I was being anointed already out of the vials of his wrath, that made me fall to criticising the critic, whenever we had parted.

After all, I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough into his neighbours to find that the outside is false, without caring to go farther and discover what is really true.  He is content to find that things are not what they seem, and broadly generalises from it that they do not exist at all.  He sees our virtues are not what they pretend they are; and, on the strength of that, he denies us the possession of virtue altogether.  He has learnt the first lesson, that no man is wholly good; but he has not even suspected that there is another equally true, to wit, that no man is wholly bad.  Like the inmate of a coloured star, he has eyes for one colour alone.  He has a keen scent after evil, but his nostrils are plugged against all good, as people plugged their nostrils before going about the streets of the plague-struck city.

Why does he do this?  It is most unreasonable to flee the knowledge of good like the infection of a horrible disease, and batten and grow fat in the real atmosphere of a lazar-house.  This was my first thought; but my second was not like unto it, and I saw that our satirist was wise, wise in his generation, like the unjust steward.  He does not want light, because the darkness is more pleasant.  He does not wish to see the good, because he is happier without it.  I recollect that when I walked with him, I was in a state of divine exaltation, such as Adam and Eve must have enjoyed when the savour of the fruit was still unfaded between their lips; and I recognise that this must be the man’s habitual state.  He has the forbidden fruit in his waist-coat pocket, and can make himself a god as often and as long as he likes.  He has raised himself upon a glorious pedestal above his fellows; he has touched the summit of ambition; and he envies neither King nor Kaiser, Prophet nor Priest, content in an elevation as high as theirs, and much more easily attained.  Yes, certes, much more easily attained.  He has not risen by climbing himself, but by pushing others down.  He has grown great in his own estimation, not by blowing himself out, and risking the fate of AEsop’s frog, but simply by the habitual use of a diminishing glass on everybody else.  And I think altogether that his is a better, a safer, and a surer recipe than most others.