Emotion (Sentimental).—Sentimentality often imparts to the inner man, as apoplexy to the outer, greater sensibility and yet paralysis.
F (see Ph)
G.
Goddess.-As the Romans would rather recognize their monarchs as gods than as masters, so do men like to call the directress of their heart goddess rather than mistress,—because it is easier to adore than to obey.
H.
H.—I have often seen people who had the wherewithal of living and knew how to live,—which are not two different things,—first, flutter about the best and most superior women and suck from the honey-cup of their hearts; and, secondly, I have seen them on the same day fold their wings and light on a miserable ninny, that the ninny might inherit their—heirs. But never have I compared these butterflies to anything but butterflies, which all day long visit and rifle flowers, and yet spawn their eggs on a dirty cabbage-stump.
H.
Holbein's Leg.—I prefer repeating the H in the place of I, because under the Rubric of the I would come the Invalides, of whom I had meant to assert, that, as people who have had limbs taken off become full-blooded, so they have the less bread handed to them the more limbs they have had shot or cut off, and that this is called the Physiology and Dietetics of the military chest.—But I have pitied these (half) poor devils too much to do it.
The famous legs of Holbein afford a better joke than legs that have been taken off. That is to say, this painter used his brush in Basle only upon Basle itself; and the self-same circumstance that drove his genius to this architectural dyeing-business compelled it often to hold recess-hours therein,—namely, he guzzled terribly. A house owner, whose name is wanting in history, often came to the house-door, and swore up at the scaffolding, when the house-stainer's legs—for that was all of the painter that could be seen—were standing or staggering in the neighboring wine-cellar. Then when Holbein by-and-by came stalking along with them across the street, a quarrel came to meet him and went with him up the scaffold. This irritated the painter, who made a study even of his cups, and he proposed to himself to reform the owner. That is to say, as he owed his misfortune wholly to his legs, whose festoons the man wanted to see under the scaffolding, he resolved to make a second edition of his legs, and paint them on the house in a hanging posture, so that the man, when he looked up from the house-door below, should get the idea that the two legs and their boots were painting away up there busily. And the owner took this idea, too; but, as he observed at last that the counterfeit foot-works hung all day in one spot and never moved along, he wanted to see what kept the master so long improving and retouching at one part, and so up he went. Up there in the vacuum he easily saw that the painter ceased where the knee-pieces began, at the knee, and that the trunk, which was wanting, was again guzzling in an alibi.
I do not blame the owner for not at once on the scaffolding drawing a moral from the leg-works; he was too furious.