Previously to that
he actually obtained a prize poem himself."
"Well, doctor, and after that am I wrong to despise poetry?"
They might have comprehended this on paper, but spoken it was too keen
for them all three. The visitors stared. Dr. Wycherley came to their aid
"You might examine my young friend for hours and not detect the one
crevice in the brilliancy of his intellectual armour."
The maniac made a face as one that drinketh verjuice suddenly. "For
pity's sake, doctor, don't be so inaccurate. Say a spot on the
brilliancy, or a crevice in the armour; but not a crevice in the
brilliancy. My good friend here, gentlemen, deals in conjectural
certificates and broken metaphors. He dislocates more tropes, to my
sorrow, than even his friend Shakespeare, whom he thinks a greater
philosopher than Aristotle, and who calls the murder of an individual
sleeper the murder of sleep, confounding the concrete with the abstract,
and then talks of taking arms against a sea of troubles; query, a cork
jacket and a flask of brandy?"
"Well, Mr. Hardie," said Dr. Eskell, rather feebly, "let me tell you
those passages, which so shock your _peculiar_ notions, are among the
most applauded.
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