CHAPTER VII. Indulge Genio: carpamus dulcia: nostrum est Quod vivis cinis, et manes, et fabula fies. Vive memor lethi: fugit hora: hoc quod loquor, inde est. Indulge thy Genius, while the hour's thine own : GAPÊTUS and Agapêtae,'* said the man and his handmaids.' MRS. OPIMIAN. Perhaps, Doctor, you will have the goodness to make your view of this relation a little more intelligible to me. THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN. Assuredly, my dear. The word signifies 'beloved,' in its purest sense. And in this sense it was used by Saint Paul in reference to some of his female co-religionists and fellow-labourers in the vineyard, in whose houses he occasionally dwelt. And in this sense it was * Αγαπητὸς καὶ ἀγαπηταὶ. applied to virgins and holy men, who dwelt under the same roof in spiritual love. MRS. OPIMIAN. Very likely, indeed. You are a holy man, Doctor, but I think, if you were a bachelor, and I were a maid, I should not trust myself to be your aga— aga Agapêtê. spiritualism. THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN. But I never pretended to this sort of says it is better to marry— MRS. OPIMIAN. You need not finish the quotation. THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN. Agapêtê is often translated 'adoptive sister.' A very possible relation, I think, where there are vows of celibacy, and inward spiritual grace. MRS. OPIMIAN. Very possible, indeed: and equally possible where there are none. THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN. But more possible where there are seven adoptive sisters, than where there is only one. Perhaps. MRS. OPIMIAN. THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN. The manners, my dear, of these damsels towards their young master, are infallible indications of the relations between them. Their respectful deference to him is a symptom in which I cannot be mistaken. E MRS. OPIMIAN. I hope you are not. THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN. I am sure I am not. I would stake all my credit for observation and experience on the purity of the seven Vestals. I am not strictly accurate in calling them so for in Rome the number of Vestals was only six. But there were seven Pleiads, till one disappeared. We may fancy she became a seventh Vestal. Or as the planets used to be seven, and are now more than fifty, we may pass a seventh Vestal in the name of modern progress. MRS. OPIMIAN. There used to be seven deadly sins. How many has modern progress added to them? THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN. None, I hope, my dear. But this will be due, not to its own tendencies, but to the comprehensiveness of the old definitions. MRS. OPIMIAN. I think I have heard something like your Greek word before. THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN. Agapêmonê, my dear. You may have heard the word Agapêmonê. MRS. OPIMIAN. That is it. And what may it signify? THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN. It signifies Abode of Love: spiritual love, of course. MRS. OPIMIAN. Spiritual love, which rides in carriages and four, fares sumptuously, like Dives, and protects itself with a high wall from profane observation. THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN. Well, my dear, and there may be no harm in all that. MRS. OPIMIAN. Doctor, you are determined not to see harm in anything. THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN. I am afraid I see more harm in many things than I like to see. But one reason for not seeing harm in this Agapêmonê matter is, that I hear so little about it. The world is ready enough to promulgate scandal; but that which is quietly right may rest in peace. MRS. OPIMIAN. Surely, Doctor, you do not think this Agapêmonê right? THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN. I only say I do not know whether it is right or wrong. It is nothing new. Three centuries ago there was a Family of Love, on which Middleton wrote a comedy. Queen Elizabeth persecuted this family; Middleton made it ridiculous; but it outlived them both, and there may have been no harm in it after all. MRS. OPIMIAN. Perhaps, Doctor, the world is too good to see any novelty except in something wrong. THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN. Perhaps it is only wrong that arrests attention, because right is common, and wrong is rare. Of the many thousand persons who walk daily through a street you only hear of one who has been robbed or knocked down. If ever Hamlet's news-' that the world has grown honest'-should prove true, there would be an end of our newspaper. For, let us see, what is the epitome of a newspaper? In the first place, specimens of all the deadly sins, and infinite varieties of violence and fraud; a great quantity of talk, called by courtesy legislative wisdom, of which the result is an incoherent and undigested mass of law, shot down, as from a rubbish-cart, on the heads of the people;'* lawyers barking at each other in that peculiar style of hylactic delivery which is called forensic eloquence, and of which the first and most distinguished practitioner was Cerberus ; † bear-garden meetings of mismanaged companies, in which directors and shareholders abuse each other in choice terms, not all to be found even in Rabelais; burstings of bank bubbles, which, like a touch of harlequin's wand, strip off their masks and dominoes from 'highly respectable' gentlemen, and leave them in their true figures of cheats and pickpockets; societies of all sorts, for teaching everybody everything, meddling with everybody's business, and mending everybody's morals; mountebank advertisements promising the beauty of Helen in a bottle of cosmetic, and the age of Old Parr in a box of pills; folly all alive in things called reunions; announcements that some exceedingly stupid fellow has been 'entertaining' a select company; matters, however multiform, multifarious, and multitudinous, all brought into family likeness by the varnish of false pretension with which they are all overlaid. + Cerberus forensis erat causidicus.-PETRONIUS ARBITER. |