It may be taken as an axiom that if you want to blast a man's reputation as a tolerable specimen of the human race, you have merely to class him as respectable. The very word is damnatory and detestable. At best it always leaves a bad flavour of middle-class hashes in the mouth, and wafts to the nostrils the reek of stuffy parlours with horsehair couches, dried grass, and wax flowers. "A most respectable man." We all know him--a sort of factory-made cheap line in humanity, with a few prim, precise, little superstitions, no reasoned morals, and no intellectual or æsthetic needs. He is a big man of a petty sect, and on Sunday he troops a stout, silk-dressed wife and seven or eight children to hear Boanerges hold forth at the tin Bethel at the end of the street. This is one type, perhaps the commonest. Another sort is not particularly pietistic, but "eminently respectable." He lives at Brixton or Clapham in a continuous struggle to keep up a "decent" appearance among the neighbours. His wife "takes in paying guests," and his daughters spend most of their time in blocking the pavement in front of drapers' shops. Mamma and the girls are gangrened with respectability and snobbishness, but were it not for the inherited virus they might have been decent and wholesome women. Their minds are blank to all the wider interests of life; they are simply mechanical dolls. Says a woman concerning these types: "I have known miners, railway men, iron and cotton and wool workers, many who have denied themselves physical necessities to buy and read a book, attend lectures, or a concert. I never knew a middle-class woman guilty of such a glaring want of common-sense." To live respectably, as the world deems respectability, is to live a lie. No man or woman with a part to play in life can play it well if they are constantly exercised as to what people will think--people, in this instance, standing for Respectability. Can any wholesome influence come out of the frowsy atmosphere of a villa inhabited by Veneerings? As well expect to find lilies within the fences of the alkali works. The fact is that what Respectability thinks is never of the slightest importance to a man of real moral stamina and vigour of intellect. He has learnt with Schopenhauer that reputation is of little avail in the making of happiness. "What we are in and for ourselves," says that philosopher, "is of sole moment; and if we have had an opportunity of seeing how the greatest of men will meet with nothing but slight from half-a-dozen blockheads, we shall understand that to lay great value upon what other people say is to pay them too much honour." A woman who was horribly crushed in the Crewe railway accident begged the surgeon with her dying breath to set her bonnet straight. It was not death that she feared, but the opinion of that grimmer monster Respectability; a striking instance this of the firm hold that the instinct has upon feeble minds.