One who studies man in puppets (in which purpose lies the chief value of this amusing species), must think that we are degenerating rapidly.  The puppet hero, for instance, is a changed being.  We know what he was; but now he takes shelter in his wits.  His organs affect his destiny.  Careless of the fact that the hero’s achievement is to conquer nature, he seems rather to boast of his subservience to her.

Still, up to this day, the fixture of a nose upon the puppet-hero’s frontispiece has not been attempted.  Some one does it at last.  When the alternative came:  “No nose to the hero, no moral to the tale;” could there be hesitation?

And I would warn our sentimentalists to admit the nose among the features proper to heroes, otherwise the race will become extinct.  There is already an amount of dropping of the curtain that is positively wearisome, even to extremely refined persons, in order to save him from apparent misconduct.  He will have to go altogether, unless we boldly figure him as other men.  Manifestly the moment his career as a fairy prince was at end, he was on the high road to a nose.  The beneficent Power that discriminated for him having vanished utterly, he was, like a bankrupt gentleman, obliged to do all the work for himself.  This is nothing more than the tendency of the generations downward from the ideal.

The springs that moved Wilfrid upon the present occasion were simple.  We will strip him of his heroic trappings for one fleeting instant, and show them.

Jumping briskly from a restless bed, his first act was to address his features to the looking-glass:  and he saw surely the most glorious sight for a hero of the knightly age that could possibly have been offered.  The battle of the previous night was written there in one eloquent big lump, which would have passed him current as hero from end to end of the land in the great days of old.  These are the tea-table days.  His preference was for the visage of Wilfrid Pole, which he saw not.  At the aspect of the fearful mask, this young man stared, and then cursed; and then, by an odd transition, he was reminded, as by the force of a sudden gust, that Emilia’s hair was redolent of pipe-smoke.

His remark was, “I can’t be seen in this state.”  His thought (a dim reminiscence of poetical readings):  “Ambrosial locks indeed!” A sad irony, which told that much gold-leaf had peeled away from her image in his heart.

Wilfrid was a gallant fellow, with good stuff in him.  But, he was young.  Ponder on that pregnant word, for you are about to see him grow.  He was less a coxcomb than shamefaced and sentimental; and one may have these qualities, and be a coxcomb to boot, and yet be a gallant fellow.  One may also be a gallant fellow, and harsh, exacting, double-dealing, and I know not what besides, in youth.  The question asked by nature is, “Has he the heart to take and keep an impression?” For, if he has, circumstances