Philaster Love Lies a Bleeding
PHILASTER: OR, Love lies a Bleeding. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher * * * * * _The Scene being in_ Cicilie. * * * * * Persons Represented in the Play. _The_ King.
CHAPTER I
The commercial traveller, a personage unknown to antiquity, is one of
the striking figures created by the manners and customs of our present
epoch. May he not, in some conceivable order of things, be destined to
mark for coming philosophers the great transition which welds a period
of material enterprise to the period of intellectual strength? Our
century will bind the realm of isolated power, abounding as it does in
creative genius, to the realm of universal but levelling might;
equalizing all products, spreading them broadcast among the masses,
and being itself controlled by the principle of unity,--the final
expression of all societies. Do we not find the dead level of
barbarism succeeding the saturnalia of popular thought and the last
struggles of those civilizations which accumulated the treasures of
the world in one direction?
The commercial traveller! Is he not to the realm of ideas what our
stage-coaches are to men and things? He is their vehicle; he sets them
going, carries them along, rubs them up with one another. He takes
from the luminous centre a handful of light, and scatters it broadcast
among the drowsy populations of the duller regions. This human
pyrotechnic is a scholar without learning, a juggler hoaxed by
himself, an unbelieving priest of mysteries and dogmas, which he
expounds all the better for his want of faith. Curious being! He
has seen everything, known everything, and is up in all the ways
PHILASTER: OR, Love lies a Bleeding. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher * * * * * _The Scene being in_ Cicilie. * * * * * Persons Represented in the Play. _The_ King.