done with it, while we follow with admiration, and even sympathy, the torrent of ideas and fancies which flows through his mire. But to see a man trying to be elegant and remaining obscene, endeavoring to paint the sentiments of a navvy in the language of a man of the world, who tries to find a suitable metaphor for every kind of filth, who plays the blackguard studiously and deliberately, who, excused neither by genuine feeling, nor the glow of fancy, nor knowledge, nor genius, degrades a good style of writing to such work--it is like a rascal who sets himself to sully a set of gems in a gutter. The end of all is but disgust and illness. While La Fontaine continues to the last day capable of tenderness and happiness, this man at the age of thirty insults the weaker sex with spiteful malignity: "When she is young, she whores herself for sport; And when she's old, she bawds for her support.... She is a snare, a shamble, and a stews; Her meat and sauce she does for lechery chuse, And does in laziness delight the more, Because by that she is provoked to whore. Ungrateful, treacherous, enviously inclined, Wild beasts are tamed, floods easier far confined, Than is her stubborn and rebellious mind.... Her temper so extravagant we find, She hates, or is impertinently kind. Would she be grave, she then looks like a devil, And like a fool or whore, when she be civil.... Contentious, wicked, and not fit to trust, And covetous to spend it on her lust."[239] What a confession is such a judgment! what an abstract of life. You see the roisterer stupefied at the end of his career, dried up like a mummy, eaten away by ulcers. Amid the choruses, the crude satires, the remembrance of plans miscarried, the sullied enjoyments which are heaped up in his wearied brain as in a sink, the fear of damnation is fermenting; he dies a devotee at the age of thirty-three.