94 PROSERPINA. 



years of her previous existence. Nevertheless, 

 neither love, chastity, nor blushing, are merely ex- 

 ponents of digestion. 



All these materialisms, in their unclean stupidity, 

 are essentially the work of human bats ; men of 

 semi-faculty or semi-education, who are more or 

 less incapable of so much as seeing, much less 

 thinking about, colour ; among whom, for one- 

 sided intensity, even Mr. Darwin must be often 

 ranked, as in his vespertilian treatise on the ocelli 

 of the Argus pheasant, which he imagines to be 

 artistically gradated, and perfectly imitative of a 

 ball and socket. If I had him here in Oxford 

 for a week, and could force him to try to copy a 

 feather by Bewick, or to draw for himself a boy's 

 thumbed marble, his notions of feathers, and balls, 

 would be changed for all the rest of his life. But 

 his ignorance of good art is no excuse for the 

 acutely illogical simplicity of the rest of his talk 

 of colour in the "Descent of Man." Peacocks' tails, 

 he thinks, are the result of the admiration of blue 

 tails in the minds of well-bred peahens, — and simi- 

 larly, mandrills' noses the result of the admiration 

 of blue noses in well-bred baboons. But it never 

 occurs to him to ask why the admiration of blue 

 noses is healthy in baboons, so that it develops 

 their race properly, while similar maidenly admira- 



