But, when the heart of a man so fashioned is stirred to love a woman, it has a new vital force, new health, and cannot play these solemn pranks.  The flesh, and all its fatality, claims him.  When Sir Purcell became acquainted with Cornelia, he found the very woman his heart desired, or certainly a most admirable picture of her.  It was, perhaps, still more to the lady’s credit, if she was only striving to be what he was learning to worship.  The beneficial change wrought in him, made him enamoured of healthy thinking and doing.  Had this, as a result of sharp mental overhauling, sprung from himself, there would have been hope for him.  Unhappily, it was dependent on her who inspired it.  He resolved that life should be put on a fresh trial in her person; and expecting that naturally to fail, of which he had always entertained a base conception, he was perforce brought to endow her with unexampled virtues, in order to keep any degree of confidence tolerably steadfast in his mind.  The lady accepted the decorations thus bestowed on her, with much grace and willingness.  She consented, little aware of her heroism, to shine forth as an ‘ideal;’ and to this he wantonly pinned his faith.  Alas! in our world, where all things must move, it becomes, by-and-by, manifest that an ‘ideal,’ or idol, which you will, has not been gifted with two legs.  What is, then, the duty of the worshipper?  To make, as I should say, some compromise between his superstitious reverence and his recognition of facts.  Cornelia, on her pedestal, could not prefer such a request plainly; but it would have afforded her exceeding gratification, if the man who adored her had quietly taken her up and fixed her in a fresh post, of his own choosing entirely, in the new circles of changeing events.  Far from doing that, he appeared to be unaware that they went, with the varying days, through circles, forming and reforming.  He walked rather as a man down a lengthened corridor, whose light to which he turns is in one favourite corner, visible till he reaches the end.  What Cornelia was, in the first flaming of his imagination around her, she was always, unaffected by circumstance, to remain.  It was very hard.  The ‘ideal’ did feel the want—­if not of legs—­of a certain tolerant allowance for human laws on the part of her worshipper; but he was remorselessly reverential, both by instinct and of necessity.  Women are never quite so mad in sentimentalism as men.

We have now looked into the hazy interior of their systems—­our last halt, I believe, and last examination of machinery, before Emilia quits England.