Truly, my soul cleaves to the dust of such things. But I have not so perverted my soul, nor palsied my brains, as to expect to be advantaged by that adhesion. I don't expect, because I have gathered much, to find Nature or man gathering for me more:--to find eighteenpence in my pill-box in the morning, instead of a shilling, as a "reward for continence;" or to make an income of my Koran by lending it to poor scholars. If I think a scholar can read it,--(N.B., I can't, myself,)--and would like to--and will carefully turn the leaves by the outside edge, he is welcome to read it for nothing: if he has got into the habit of turning leaves by the middle, or of wetting his finger, and shuffling up the corners, as I see my banker's clerks do with their ledgers, for no amount of money shall he read it. (Incidentally, note the essential vulgarism of doing anything in a hurry.) So that my mind and brains are in fact untainted and unwarped by lust of money, and I am free in that respect from the power of the Infamy of Crete. I used the words just above--Furies of Phlegethon. You are beginning to know something of the Fates: of the Furies also you must know something. The pit of Dante's central hell is reserved for those who have actually committed malicious crime, involving mercilessness to their neighbour, or, in suicide, to themselves. But it is necessary to serpent-tail this pit with the upper hell by a district for insanity without deed; the Fury which has brought horror to the eyes, and hardness to the heart, and yet, having possessed itself of noble persons, issues in no malicious crime. Therefore the sixth circle of the upper hell is walled in, together with the central pit, as one grievous city of the dead; and at the gates of it the warders are fiends, and the watchers Furies. Watchers, observe, as sleepless. Once in their companionship, Nor poppy, nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou owed'st yesterday. Sleepless and merciless; and yet in the Greek vision of them which Æschylus wrote, they are first seen asleep; and they remain in the city of Theseus, in mercy. Elsewhere, furies that make the eyes evil and the heart hard. Seeing Dante from their watch-tower, they call for Medusa. "So will we make flint of him" ("enamel," rather--which has been in the furnace first, then hardened); but Virgil puts his hands over his eyes.