But he was to learn that follies are not always laughable, that eadem sentire is a bond, and that, when a clever and pretty woman chooses to be a fool, her lover, if he is wise, will be a greater—if he can.
The next time they met, Lord Ipsden found Lady Barbara occupied with a gentleman whose first sentence proclaimed him a pupil of Mr. Thomas Carlyle, and he had the mortification to find that she had neither an ear nor an eye for him.
Human opinion has so many shades that it is rare to find two people agree.
But two people may agree wonderfully, if they will but let a third think for them both.
Thus it was that these two ran so smoothly in couples.
Antiquity, they agreed, was the time when the world was old, its hair gray, its head wise. Every one that said, “Lord, Lord!” two hundred years ago was a Christian. There were no earnest men now; Williams, the missionary, who lived and died for the Gospel, was not earnest in religion; but Cromwell, who packed a jury, and so murdered his prisoner—Cromwell, in whose mouth was heaven, and in his heart temporal sovereignty—was the pattern of earnest religion, or, at all events, second in sincerity to Mahomet alone, in the absence of details respecting Satan, of whom we know only that his mouth is a Scripture concordance, and his hands the hands of Mr. Carlyle's saints.
Then they went back a century or two, and were eloquent about the great antique heart, and the beauty of an age whose samples were Abbot Sampson and Joan of Arc.
Lord Ipsden hated argument; but jealousy is a brass spur, it made even this man fluent for once.
He suggested “that five hundred years added to a world's life made it just five hundred years older, not younger—and if older, grayer—and if grayer, wiser.
“Of Abbot Sampson,” said he, “whom I confess both a great and a good man, his author, who with all his talent belongs to the class muddle-head, tells us that when he had been two years in authority his red hair had turned gray, fighting against the spirit of his age; how the deuce, then, could he be a sample of the spirit of his age?