He has become immortal
because he cared nothing about the most important movement with
which he was ever brought into connection (I wish people who are in
search of immortality would lay the lesson to heart and not make so
much noise about important movements) and so, if Dr. Skinner becomes
immortal, it will probably be for some reason very different from
the one which he so fondly imagined.
Could it be expected to enter into the head of such a man as this
that in reality he was making his money by corrupting youth; that it
was his paid profession to make the worse appear the better reason
in the eyes of those who were too young and inexperienced to be able
to find him out; that he kept out of the sight of those whom he
professed to teach material points of the argument, for the production
of which they had a right to rely upon the honour of anyone who made
professions of sincerity; that he was a passionate,
half-turkey-cock, half-gander of a man whose sallow, bilious face
and hobble-gobble voice could scare the timid, but who would take to
his heels readily enough if he were met firmly; that his
"Meditations on St. Jude," such as they were, were cribbed without
acknowledgment, and would have been beneath contempt if so many people
did not believe them to have been written honestly? Mrs.
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