[ 522 ] [Nov. 



THE MALCONTENT. 



IT truly causes a reflecting man to sigh, and to toss the scornful nose 

 into the air, when he reflects upon the baseness, malice, and hypocrisy 

 of his friends and acquaintance, more particularly of such as happen to 

 be related to him, either by blood or marriage, by consanguinity, or 

 contract. But I wish I" could describe accurately upon paper these 

 upraisings of the feature, and interjectional mumblings. I despair, by 

 any representation, however lively, of conveying any, the least idea, even 

 to the most ductile mind, of those sounds and significations, whereof we 

 possess in words no adequate and efficient type such anonuvlous and 

 absurd phrases as " Pish !" " Heigho !" and the like, being by no 

 means to be heard in real life, and being, moreover, noises that do in no 

 wise interpret those fitful, yet withal placid, breathings, that a philoso- 

 phical enthusiast might naturally be supposed to emit. 



There are my wife's relations, on the one hand, insisting, over their 

 anti-Lethean potations of clipped besom and sloe-leaf, that I did mainly 

 contribute to the domestic disquiet and infelicity of that, sooth to say, 

 most intolerable female ; that I was frequently in the habit of dismissing 

 missiles of a specific gravity upon strange errands at her ; and that I 

 was, finally, in effect, the cause of her untimely disappearance from this 

 planet to the world of spirits. Absurd in the highest degree, absurd 

 upon my life ; unkind, and uncandid, also. As though those salutary 

 corrections I felt it my duty to bestow, were awarded in a spirit of hos- 

 tility to the individual quasi, a substance ; as though, in a word, they 

 were any thing else than a practical illustration of a theory of abstraction 

 in which I, a philosophical amateur, am well pleased to indulge. Do I 

 make myself thoroughly understood ? No ! 



Well, then, behold me, not brutally maltreating a defenceless 

 woman, but laudably attacking untenable positions erecting my moral 

 and physical powers against the edifice that vanity has reared, and pull- 

 ing down the unsafe premises. I must, I say, be considered therefore, 

 not as one beating his wife, but as a belabourer of stray sophisms, or as 

 one who cudgels vain conclusions. This is what I term the manipu- 

 lation of morals, and is a thousand times more satisfactory than undefined 

 theory or unmeaning declamation. 



My own relatives, for their part, have taken up absurd notions re- 

 specting me. They make no scruple of asserting that I am given over 

 to the adoption of immensely frequent imbibations ; that I am flagrantly 

 remiss in the narration of fact ; that I am a man of no certain or definite 

 principles (of which, by the by, they contrive to furnish examples) ; 

 and that I am utterly destitute of right feeling : nay, some more chari- 

 table, have no difficulty in hinting at the fact of a perplexed and in- 

 volved entanglement of my intellects, assuring themselves of a crack in 

 the cerebellum, or a lamentable flaw in the occiput. 



Let me admit that, a disciple to the doctrine of the perfectibility of 

 human nature, I do, not seldom, rashly, perhaps, but fearlessly, state 

 things that are not mere slavish drudges at the heels of fact things 

 that if not true, ought to be so : and hence the common, too common 

 notion, that I am not scrupulously exact in the delineation of narrative 

 reality. 



It is impossible that I should ever become a drunkard I am clear 



