we can hop; and all England jeers at the man attempting it.  He caps himself with this or that one of their titles.  For it is not the popular thing among Englishmen.  Their hero, when they have done their fighting, is the wealthy patron of Sport.  What sort of creatures are his comrades?  But he cannot have comrades unless he is on the level of them.  Yet let him be never so high above them, they charge him and point him as a piece of cannon; assenting to the flatteries they puff into him, he is their engine.  ’The idol of the hour is the mob’s wooden puppet, and the doing of the popular thing seed of no harvest,’ Gower Woodseer says, moderately well, snuffing incense of his happy delivery.  Not to be the idol, to have an aim of our own, there lies the truer pride, if we intend respect of ourselves.

The Mr. Pulpit young men have in them, until their habits have fretted him out, was directing Lord Fleetwood’s meditations upon the errors of the general man, as a cover for lateral references to his hitherto erratic career:  not much worse than a swerving from the right line, which now seemed the desirable road for him, and had previously seemed so stale, so repulsive.  He was, of course, only half-conscious of his pulpitizing; he fancied the serious vein of his thoughts attributable to a tumbled night.  Nevertheless, he had the question whether that woman—­poor girl!—­was influencing his thoughts.  For in a moment, the very word ‘respect’ pitched him upon her character; to see it a character that emerged beneath obstacles, and overcame ridicule, won suffrages, won a reluctant husband’s admiration, pricked him from distaste to what might really be taste for her companionship, or something more alarming to contemplate in the possibilities,—­thirst for it.  He was driving away, and he longed to turn back.  He did respect her character:  a character angular as her features were, and similarly harmonious, splendid in action.

Respect seems a coolish form of tribute from a man who admires.  He had to say that he did not vastly respect beautiful women.  Have they all the poetry?  Know them well, and where is it?

The pupil of Gower Woodseer asked himself to specify the poetry of woman.  She is weak and inferior, but she has it; civilized men acknowledge it; and it is independent, or may be beside her gift of beauty.  She has more of it than we have.  Then name it.

Well, the flowers of the field are frail things.  Pluck one, and you have in your hand the frailest of things.  But reach through the charm of colour and the tale of its beneficence in frailty to the poetry of the flower, and secret of the myriad stars will fail to tell you more than does that poetry of your little flower.  Lord Feltre, at the heels of St. Francis, agrees in that.