Part 50 (1/2)
”He 's got a dish o' good rain-water aside him; but if people would on'y consider”----
”True--very true Now go away, dear, and don't coive her liberty to talk”
The girl limped back to the scene of her unromantic martyrdom, and I made a feeble effort to shake the dew-drops froive this life over, I thought; and I will give it over; an I do not, I am a villain After all, there are not two sides to this question; there is only one; and you may trust an overclean , upon hest authority on headaches, fantods, and bankruptcy
The Spartans (so ran my reflections) were as much addicted to dirt as the Sybarites to cleanliness; and just co races of later ages--Goths, Huns, Vandals, Longobards, &c--were no less celebrated for one kind of grit than for the other
It is the Turkish bath that has made the once-formidable Ottoman Empire the sick e estates ruined Italy) Yes Blae estate ruin you? Bathing did the business for Italy, as it does the business for all its victims If Rome had left to the soft Capuan his baths and his perfuh But think of the polished Ro the question of survival with the superlatively dirty barbarian of the North! Polished is good, for, in the ruins of the fatal Roulae, used by the bathers to polish their skins, bear sad testimony to the suicidal cleanliness of that dooula-polished Roman, morally and physically, with his contemporary, the filth-encrusted anchorite of the Thebaid--the for out with a sulphurous s an inter scoffers dead, or blind, or paralytic, at pleasure
And, talking of hermits--do you think Peter of Picardy could have launched the ainst the less muscular, because cleaner, Islamism of Western Asia, but for his well-advertised vow, never to change his clothes, nor wash himself, till his contract should be cos than the Emperor in his purple! and justly too, for he achieved the very apotheosis of dirt--animate, no doubt, as well as inanimate Or take the first Teutonic Eislator, and what not In those es, you know, it was the custom to name monarchs from some peculiarity of person or habitude--and I put it to any reasonable soul; Was this ure of the 10th century, but for such rigid abstinence fronificant naly appropriate bestowal of the title, 'Great,'
is made e refer to the adherents of the dirt-cult, collectively, as the Great Unwashed Again, Dr Johnson's biographies lovingly preserve the personal habits of lish soil; and think what a large percentage of those Muse-invokers, according to their historian, carried a fair quantity of that soil perennially on their hides And speaking of the Diogenes of Fleet Street hiood authority, that his antipathy to the Order of the Bath caused him to appeal to more senses than one He was another Otto the Great
The original Diogenes, by the way, revelled in dirt, as well as in wisdohty scholar, Porson, as you may remember, never needed to wash, because he never perspired
Yet in spite of this cloud of witness, and in the face of our own experience, ill entice external leakage of such incipient greatness as we have-- soaking ourselves in water, as if ere possuht to dissipate Look at ; now thus! Thunder-and-turf! have I fallen so low? And yet I was once like our Otto and Co!
Before touching the forbidden thing, I felt as if I wanted to pursue an inspiring, if purposeless, journey up uncohts, with ht blue eye; now, the maiden's invitation seems to be the only part of the enterprise that has any pith in it Then, I gloried in the fiendish adage of, 'Two hours' sleep for a man, three for a woaze my fill on yon calm deep, then, like an infant, sink asleep on this form, and so re, as I do, to the better classes
Then, I was like Hotspur on his crop-eared roan; now, I -place, with one fair Spirit for liht that I would be content with one fair Spirit Got to, go to!
By virtue, thou enforcest laughter
”I wish I was as happy as you,” ain silently approached ”Here's tspapers; they done with theirl's tears broke forth afresh, whilst ungovernable sobs shook her froit it off o' my mind what Mrs Bodyzart said”
”Ida! Ida!” I re your nose red” The inforh she still persisted in chewing her grievance
”I can prove there ain't one word o' truth in it,” she continued pertinaciously
”What's your idea of proof, Ida?”
”I can prove it on the Bible,” she replied eagerly
”That settles theto the Middle Ages”
”Indeed I don't!” she replied, with a flash of resentment ”I enty-seven last birthday; an' I don't care who knows it--on the third of July, it was--an' I would n't care tuppence if her ladyshi+p snoke roun' tellin'
people I was forty But to put a slur on me like that! I leave it to your own self, Mr Collins--was it right?”
”Right? I repeated wearily ”In heaven's naht or otherwise? That's Mrs Beaudesart's own business, not yours Why, if she chargedto folly, I would merely say, 'Sorry to undeceive you,”I dare not” wait upon ”I would,”
like the poor bandicoot i' the adage' But I certainly shouldn't concernentirely between herself and Saint Peter”
”Ah! but you're different,” replied the girl sadly
”Simply because I'm a philosopher, Ida I've held communion with the Unfathomable, and watched the exfoliation of the Inscrutable; and, you know, these things are altogether beyond the orbit of the girl-ood fellow, and let one to take any interest in either of the loathsome contemporanes; too ain, ed for the opinion of hty pipe on the dirt-question; but that faithful ally was packed aht as well have been forty miles So I just lay on the seat, clean, frail, and inert, as a recue; whilst the ancient t'other-sider oscillated his frahtened his toil with selections fro Priestley hurried up his bullocks froardener, used his hoe aee, with the autoht up to one holiday per annu sands of Life dribbled through the unheeded isthmus of the Present Moment; and the fixed cone of the Past expanded; and the di Future