Nevertheless, it would be cruel to deprive even Hodge of an idea, provided the idea be good for him. For ideas are the only unalterable suggestions of the eternal; their forms change, but themselves are ever the same. One Idea, running through history, built Baal-bec, the Pyramids, the temples of India, the Duomo of Milan, and in our own poor day of brag, the hideous Eiffel tower. The idea has always been the same; to compass great height and vastness of some kind, and Eiffel has only dragged down to the level of his merely mechanical intelligence Nimrod's fantastic notion of the Tower of Babel. Nimrod had a belief that he could reach Heaven. M. Eiffel was convinced he could advertise himself. _Voilà la difference!_ That "difference" is the great gulf between ancient art and modern. In the past they went star-gazing and tried to climb--in the present, we stay where we are, look after ourselves, and put up an advertisement. Thus has the form of the idea changed from the likeness of a god into a painted clown--yet, fundamentally, it is still the same idea. And, reduced to its primeval element, its first dim, nebulous hint, an idea is nothing but a dream. Hence I return to my previous proposition, _i.e._, the respect we owe to dreams, particularly when they result in fixed realities such as, well!--such as curates, for example. I mention this class of individuals particularly, because there are so many of them, and also because they are generally so desperately poor, and (to young ladies in country parishes) so desperately interesting. What English fiction would do without a curate or a clerical personage of some kind or other to figure in its pages I dare not imagine. The novels of other countries do not produce such hosts of invaluable churchmen, but in England the most successful books are frequently those which treat of the clergy, from "Robert Elsmere," who found himself startled out of orthodoxy by a few familiar and well-ventilated French and German theories of creed, down to the gentle milksops of the church as found in the novels of Anthony Trollope and the dreary stories of Miss Edna Lyall. This well-intentioned lady's productions would assuredly find few readers were it not for the "old-woman-and-faded-spinster" fanaticism for clergymen. And yet--I once knew a wicked army man (worshippers of Edna Lyall prepare to be disgusted! truth is always disgusting) who for some years amused himself by collecting out of the daily newspapers, cuttings of all the police reports and criminal cases in which clergymen were implicated, and this volume, an exceedingly bulky one, he brought to me, with a Mephistophelian twinkle in his bad old eyes. "Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest!" said he. "These fellows in 'holy orders' have committed every crime in the calendar, and the only mischief I have not found them out in yet is Arson!"