The one who took the whim of calling himself Melchior concealed under a phlegmatic ice-crust an equatorial glow, and was a Hecla, that splits its ice-mountains before it flings out flames; with cold eye and languid voice and pale brow he spoke in a monosyllabic, sententious, condensed style,--he saw the truth only in a burning reflector, and his ink was a tearing waterspout. The second Englishman was a philosopher and German at once. The elder Cato, who likewise represented the Moorish king, every one knows. I am as glad as if it were I myself, that my hero was the very one who was distinguished from them all by a greater serene considerateness of free-thinking. I mean that Socratic bright eye which glances round freely over and through the garden of the trees of knowledge, and which chooses like a man, whereas others are exclusively impelled by instinct toward some one proposition, some one apple of these trees, as every insect is to its fruit. Moral freedom operates no less on our opinions than on our actions; and despite all grounds of decision in the understanding, and all grounds of motive in the will, still man _chooses_ as well his system as his conduct. Hence, almost even before supper, the three twins had become cold in affection toward Sebastian, merely because he was so in judgment. He was to-day for the first time in a case with them, into which he fell three times every day with Flamin; certain men can better worry down unlimited contradiction than limited concurrence. The case was this: Matthieu, by his satiric exaggerations, gave to the slight dissimilarity between Victor and them an ever-increasing prominence. He said (not for the purpose of making allusion, but only of seeming to) that princes to whom, as from the Chinese king, their subjects prayed for political weather, helped themselves like that rector who himself composed the almanac, and allowed his scholars (in this, case the favorites of the princes) to make the weather for it. He said, too, that the poets could _sing_ for Liberty, indeed, but not _speak_ for it; that they imitated in a timid plight under the mask of tragic heroes the voice of the heroes, just as he had often witnessed a similar joke in the case of a roasted calf's head, which seemed to the whole table to bellow like a living calf, whereas there was nothing inside but a live tree-toad, which sent forth its croaking. "But it were a still greater cowardice," said Victor, "not even to sing; only I know men are now neither _barbaric_ nor cultivated enough to enjoy the Poets and follow them; _Poets_, _Religion_, _Passions_, and _Women_ are four things which live through three ages, whereof we are just in the middle age,--that of _despising_ them; the past age was that of _deifying_ them; the future will be that of _honoring_ them." The indignant trio of twins were of opinion that religion, and women particularly, were merely for the state. Besides, Victor's republican