) His Lordship's naive distinction between people of
condition and men of parts is as good as Pope's between genteel and
poetical men. I fancy the poet grinning savagely as he read it.
[96] "Nothing is truly sublime," he himself said, "that is not just
and proper."
[97] Dennis in a letter to Tonson, 1715.
WITCHCRAFT.[98]
Credulity, as a mental and moral phenomenon, manifests itself in widely
different ways, according as it chances to be the daughter of fancy or
terror. The one lies warm about the heart as Folk-lore, fills moonlit
dells with dancing fairies, sets out a meal for the Brownie, hears the
tinkle of airy bridle-bells as Tamlane rides away with the Queen of
Dreams, changes Pluto and Proserpine into Oberon and Titania, and makes
friends with unseen powers as Good Folk; the other is a bird of night,
whose shadow sends a chill among the roots of the hair: it sucks with the
vampire, gorges with the ghoule, is choked by the night-hag, pines away
under the witch's charm, and commits uncleanness with the embodied
Principle of Evil, giving up the fair realm of innocent belief to a murky
throng from the slums and stews of the debauched brain. Both have
vanished from among educated men, and such superstition as comes to the
surface now-a-days is the harmless Jacobitism of sentiment, pleasing
itself with the fiction all the more because there is no exacting reality
behind it to impose a duty or demand a sacrifice.
Pages:
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128