‘Madness’ is the word that hits the mark, but it does not fully embrace the meaning.  To be in this state, says the Philosopher, is to be ’On The Hippogriff;’ and to this, as he explains, the persons who travel to Love by the road of sentiment will come, if they have any stuff in them, and if the one who kindles them is mighty.  He distinguishes being on the Hippogriff from being possessed by passion.  Passion, he says, is noble strength on fire, and points to Emilia as a representation of passion.  She asks for what she thinks she may have; she claims what she imagines to be her own.  She has no shame, and thus, believing in, she never violates, nature, and offends no law, wild as she may seem.  Passion does not turn on her and rend her when it is thwarted.  She was never carried out of the limit of her own intelligent force, seeing that it directed her always, with the simple mandate to seek that which belonged to her.  She was perfectly sane, and constantly just to herself, until the failure of her voice, telling her that she was a beggar in the world, came as a second blow, and partly scared her reason.  Constantly just to herself, mind!  This is the quality of true passion.  Those who make a noise, and are not thus distinguishable, are on Hippogriff.

—­By which it is clear to me that my fantastic Philosopher means to indicate the lover mounted in this wise, as a creature bestriding an extraneous power.  “The sentimentalist,” he says, “goes on accumulating images and hiving sensations, till such time as (if the stuff be in him) they assume a form of vitality, and hurry him headlong.  This is not passion, though it amazes men, and does the madder thing.”

In fine, it is Hippogriff.  And right loath am I to continue my partnership with a fellow who will not see things on the surface, and is, as a necessary consequence, blind to the fact that the public detest him.  I mean, this garrulous, super-subtle, so-called Philosopher, who first set me upon the building of ‘The Three Volumes,’ it is true, but whose stipulation that he should occupy so large a portion of them has made them rock top-heavy, to the forfeit of their stability.  He maintains that a story should not always flow, or, at least, not to a given measure.  When we are knapsack on back, he says, we come to eminences where a survey of our journey past and in advance is desireable, as is a distinct pause in any business, here and there.  He points proudly to the fact that our people in this comedy move themselves,—­are moved from their own impulsion,—­and that no arbitrary hand has posted them to bring about any event and heap the catastrophe.  In vain I tell him that he is meantime making tatters of the puppets’ golden robe illusion:  that he is sucking the blood of their warm humanity out of them.  He promises that when Emilia is in Italy he will retire altogether; for there is a field of action, of battles and conspiracies, nerve and muscle, where life fights for plain issues, and