human
and the recusant and the pariah sat down to table with the imposing dignitaries of the Church and State. It may be well on the whole, but these gracious concessions from the Philistine are not without their perils for the philosopher and the artist. Even the wisest of them cannot always escape the moral and mental deterioration that comes of being _au fait_ in the whiffles and frothy small talk of drawing-rooms, the parlour tricks and pretty deportments; and the donning of a chimney-pot hat and a dress coat is often the first step on the downward career of the intellectual. Have we not seen it? One season will transform the modest, single-hearted, plain-living artist or student into a vain, insufferable, intellectual mountebank. A few months of interviewing, and
gpt
and posturing in Mayfair, and you change your ideas, stultify your conscience, and degenerate into a Respectable. It is almost inevitable. We are all sweetly human, and vanity is one of our prime characteristics. Most of us, also, as some critic of life observes, would rather be
human
An author of mediocre ability, possessing that quality of self-assertiveness known commonly as