[78] This passage, in capitals, being wholly astounding to me, I venture to put a note of interrogation to it. I have long myself been questioning the farmers in Westmoreland about the quantity of rank bog grass they let grow. But their only idea of improvement is to burn the heather; this being a cheap operation, and dangerous only to their neighbours’ woods. Brantwood was within an ace of becoming Brantashes last summer. [79] The name of the—certainly very efficient—teacher of these young people, and the general principles of their tuition, would have been a desirable addition, St. George thinks, to the information furnished by Mr. Mackenzie. [80] I suppose myself, in the rest of this letter, to be addressing a “business man of the nineteenth century.” [81] Thus, in the earlier numbers of Fors, I have observed more than once, to the present landholders of England, that they may keep their lands—if they can! Only let them understand that trial will soon be made, by the Laws of Nature, of such capacity in them. [82] A masterless dog, I should have written, but wanted to keep my sentence short and down to my practical friend’s capacity. For if the dog have the good fortune to find a master, he has a possession thenceforth, better than bones; and which, indeed, he will, at any moment, leave, not his meat only, but his life for. [83] It is a very subtle and lovely one, not to be discussed hurriedly. [84] See ‘definition’ quoted as satisfactory in ‘Anthropological Magazine,’ “the belief in spiritual beings,” which would make the devil a religious person, inasmuch as he both believes—and fears. [85] See the last results of modern enlightenment on this subject in Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins’s directions for the scientific representation of Dogs, illustrated by the charming drawings of that great artist;—especially compare the learned outlines of head and paw in Plate II., and the delineation of head without Psyche in Plate III., with the ignorant efforts of Velasquez in such extremities and features in our fourth photograph. Perhaps Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins will have the goodness, in his next edition, to show us how Velasquez ought to have expressed the Scapholinear, Cuneiform, Pisiform, Trapezium, Trapezoid, Magnum, and Unciform bones in those miserably drawn fore-paws. [86] Being somewhat interested in Croydon, as readers of past Fors know, and in Museums also, I give large print to these proposals. [87] I have no doubt of the mingled active sense of τίμιος in this sentence, necessary by the context; while also the phrase would be a mere flat truism, if the word were used only in its ordinary passive meaning. [88] To see clearly that whatever our fates may have been, the heaviest calamity of them—and, in a sort, the only real calamity—is our own causing, is the true humility which indeed we profess with our lips, when our heart is far from it.