'And, I tell you, hunting does me good. It awakens me out of my dreary mill-round of metaphysics. It sweeps away that infernal web of self-consciousness, and absorbs me in outward objects; and my red-hot Perillus' bull cools in proportion as my horse warms. I tell you, I never saw a man who could cut out his way across country who could not cut his way through better things when his turn came. The cleverest and noblest fellows are sure to be the best riders in the long run. And as for bad company and 'the world,' when you take to going in the first-class carriages for fear of meeting a swearing sailor in the second-class—when those who have 'renounced the world' give up buying and selling in the funds—when my uncle, the pious banker, who will only 'associate' with the truly religious, gives up dealing with any scoundrel or heathen who can 'do business' with him,—then you may quote pious people's opinions to me. In God's name, if the Stock Exchange, and railway stagging, and the advertisements in the Protestant Hue-and-Cry, and the frantic Mammon-hunting which has been for the last fifty years the peculiar pursuit of the majority of Quakers, Dissenters, and Religious Churchmen, are not The World, what is? I don't complain of them, though; Puritanism has interdicted to them all art, all excitement, all amusement—except money-making. It is their dernier ressort, poor souls!'
'But you must explain to us naughty foxhunters how all this agrees with the good book. We see plainly enough, in the meantime, how it agrees with
