Egoism within bounds is a perfectly sane and rational thing, but to keep it within bounds is exceedingly difficult. When given over to an irrational rule it grows into fanaticism. For the fanatic owes his monomania to the force of a strong personality, which engenders the unmitigated assurance of being right, plus the perverted reasoning that characterizes the sentimentalist. He is always foolish, but seldom a hypocrite, as his deception usually extends to himself. His selfishness is of the opposite sort from the epicure’s. What he seeks is not a soft berth and personal acquisitions, but a chance to impose his opinions on a misguided world, and to dominate over converts or subjects. In his milder moods he only dreams of happy schemes and far-reaching reforms, but when charged with energy his proselyting zeal tends to make him tyrannical. In some form or other he appears on the pages of almost every Victorian novelist. That the faddist is a favorite subject with Peacock is well known. Lytton gives a delightful contribution in the Uncle Jack of _The Caxtons_, whose “bewitching enthusiasm and convincing calculation” led him into alluring speculations that invariably proved disastrous to the members of his family. Not financial but missionary and philanthropic zeal animate the souls immortalized by Dickens,--Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle, Reverend Honeythunder, and the Snagsbys. Brontë and Kingsley specialize in the religious bigot. The former satirizes the Jesuit in _Villette_, but not St. John Rivers, who is drawn seriously. The latter gives a vivid picture in his Mrs. Locke and the Calvinistic preachers, and another, of the opposite type, done with more partisanship and less sympathy, in the vicar and Argemone in _Yeast_. Trollope is more interested in the sociological zealot. He introduces him as the author, Mr. Popular Sentiment; the “Barchester Brutus,” Mr. John Bold; the demagogue, Ontario Moggs, son of a capitalist, and advocate of labor unions; and some characters in the Parliamentary Series. A sample from a harangue of Moggs will serve to illustrate the fair-mindedness that accompanies Trollope’s love of parody. He quotes and then comments:[399] “‘Gentlemen, were it not for strikes, this would be a country in which no free man could live. By the aid of strikes we will make it the Paradise of the labourer, and Elysium of industry, an Eden of artisans.’ There was much more of it, but the reader might be fatigued were the full flood of Mr. Moggs’s oratory to be let loose upon him. And through it all there was a germ of truth, and a strong dash of true, noble feeling; but the speaker had omitted as yet to learn how much thought must be given to a germ of truth before it can be made to produce fruit for the multitude. And then, in speaking, grand words come so easily, while thoughts--even little thoughts--flow so slowly!”