A TALE OF TERROR.
He sat, or rather grovelled, amongst a pile of daily newspapers. His eyes were wilder, much wilder, than the Wild West of Buffalo-Bill, his hair was as dishevelled as that of an infuriated Irish M.P. after an All-night Sitting. He looked as mad as a hatter.
"What ails you?" I inquired, sympathetically, soothingly. For all answer—as the ebulliently sentimental she-novelist saith—he pointed to the pell-mell pile of morning papers.
"Poor fellow!" said I. "Have you then been trying to understand Sir Henry Roscoe's erudite Address to the British Association?"
He shook his head emphatically.
"Or to make head or tail, flesh, fowl, or good red herring of one of Auberon Herbert's acidulous jeremiads?"
Again he shook his head, and tore his hair at the same time.
"Or to learn from Matthew Arnold's moony meanderings, complacent assumptions, and tart imputations, what is the real nature of his favourite, quiet, reasonable person,
'Asperitatis et invidiæ corrector et iræ?'"
Once more that action of decided dissent.
"Then perhaps you have been trying to find the 'sweet reasonableness,' and the invaluable 'dry light' of Science in Professor Tyndall's furious fulminations from the Alps?"
"Nay, nay, not so," he sobbed, insanely.
"You may have been endeavouring to reconcile all Mr. Gladstone's Home-Rule utterances during the last ten years, to identify the Mr. Bright of to-day with the People's Tribune of forty years syne, to measure the motives of Mr. Chamberlain, or appraise the intrinsic importance of Jesse, 'the Member for Three Acres and a Cow?'"
"Alas, no!"
"Humph! You cannot possibly have been so foolish as to venture the brain-dizzying dangers of a course of the 'Thunderer's' tempestuous Home-Rule leaders?"
He had not, and intimated as much, mournfully.
"Dear me! Desperate man, do not say that you have been trying to analyse the authoritative 'Analyses' of this year's County Cricketing, to test their apportionment of champion honours, or track out their distracting decimals to their last hidden lair!"
"Worse than that—far worse!" he moonily muttered.
"You alarm me, rash man!" I cried. "Can it possibly be that from a comparison of the works of the (Sporting) Prophets you have foolishly essayed to spot the winner of the coming St. Leger?"
"No such luck," said he, with a shudder.
I drew near to him, and whispered low in his ear—
"Have you—have you been seeking the meaning of the verses of some peer-poet in the Morning Post?"
"Would—would it were but that," he groaned, picking a single straw from the truss or so that stuck porcupine-quill-wise in his tangled fell of hair.
"I have it!" I cried. "You have an attack of veritable 'Whitmania,' arising from a too long indulgence in the intoxicating yet enervating flow of Swinburnian superlatives?"
"The deuce a bit of it," he snapped, testily.
I was growing impatient, and inclined "to give it up."
"Oh! this is worse than Argyll on Political Economy, or a Double Acrostic!" I grumbled, angrily. "What in the name of Eleusis have you been up to?"
"Listen!" he whispered, placing his lips close to my ears; "listen, and marvel if you may; aid me if you can. I have been trying, by a comparison of the comments thereupon in the various party papers, to understand the real significance of a Bye-Election!!!"
"Miserable man!" I gasped, "that way indeed Madness lies. Know you not that human imbecility in those identical comments reaches its absolutely 'lowest deep' of abject folly and crazy inconsequence. Know you not that nothing—positively nothing in the whole history of this crack-brained world—is so mad and so maddening as a Tory article on a bye-election won by a Liberal, or a Liberal article on a bye-election gained by a Tory? Know you not that in these dismally, delirious lucubrations, all the rules of arithmetic, all the laws of logic, all the palpable bearings of facts, all the obvious meanings of words, to say nothing of the dictates of veracity, and the impulse of fairness, are deliberately inverted, perverted, played moral havoc and intellectual pitch-and-toss with? Know you not that the gibberings of Bedlam are clear and continent sense compared with the argufyings of a party-scribe 'explaining away' an opponent's success, or picturing an ally's crushing defeat as a 'moral victory?' Know you not that the (supposed) necessity of penning such frantic fustian makes a Tory Thunderer drivel like a drunken Thersites, and a Radical Rhadamanthus equivocate like a pettifogging attorney? Know you not——?"
But with a howl of horror the wretched victim of party silliness and factious sophistry pitched head-first amidst the pile of papers—MAD!!!