They
were only too powerful inducements in themselves, alas! but I believe I
could have resisted them tolerably, if they had not been backed by love.
And so a struggle arose, which the rich reader may think a very fantastic
one, though the poor man will understand it, and surely pardon it
also--seeing that he himself is Man. Could I not, just once in a way, serve
God and Mammon at once?--or rather, not Mammon, but Venus: a worship which
looked to me, and really was in my case, purer than all the Mariolatry in
Popedom. After all, the fall might not be so great as it seemed--perhaps I
was not infallible on these same points. (It is wonderful how humble and
self-denying one becomes when one is afraid of doing one's duty.) Perhaps
the dean might be right. He had been a republican himself once, certainly.
The facts, indeed, which I had stated, there could be no doubt of; but I
might have viewed them through a prejudiced and angry medium. I might have
been not quite logical in my deductions from them--I might.... In short,
between "perhapses" and "mights" I fell--a very deep, real, damnable fall;
and consented to emasculate my poems, and become a flunkey and a dastard.
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