"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?'"