208 THE BIRD WATCHER 
merely, or that theg®rmer at any rate—for most 
virtuous persons sin pettily—may be advancing more 
quickly than the latter? I feel sure of it myself. 
“ My dukedom,” however (if 1 had one), “to a beg- 
garly denier,” that said virtuous person would think 
very differently—which makes him, perchance, just a 
little more but one of the “fools” on “this great 
stage,” where there are so many. 
It might well be argued, I think—at any rate, I 
have seen many such arguments—that Shakespeare, in 
the lines I have quoted, intended to convey all this, in 
which case I have his great authority to shelter under. 
Goethe, however—at least, I am told so—supports me, 
if not more plainly, yet more categorically. He 
thought—or somebody, perhaps Eckermann, thought 
he thought—that we became good by sinning out our 
evil, and that evil still in us, in the shape of desire, 
was like prurient matter which ought to be discharged, 
and, at some time, would have to be, to the conse- 
quent benefit of the constitution. Given, as I say, a 
continuance of life and advance—I cannot, for myself, 
imagine the one without the other—there seems to me 
much force in this doctrine, and I commend it—as 
that sort of physic which Lady Macbeth so much 
needed—to the members of any cabinet that has made 
any war, and to politicians and millionaires generally, 
and to South African millionaires in particular. 
All this must be the effect of lumbago, which is the 
effect of the Shetlands ; but let me shake it off. The 
chick has been fed once, but I was taken by surprise, 
