Family interests compelled Mr Glowry to receive occasional visits from
Mr and Mrs Hilary, who paid them from the same motive; and, as the
lively gentleman on these occasions found few conductors for his
exuberant gaiety, he became like a double-charged electric jar, which
often exploded in some burst of outrageous merriment to the signal
discomposure of Mr Glowry's nerves.
Another occasional visitor, much more to Mr Glowry's taste, was Mr
Flosky,[1] a very lachrymose and morbid gentleman, of some note in
the literary world, but in his own estimation of much more merit than
name. The part of his character which recommended him to Mr Glowry,
was his very fine sense of the grim and the tearful. No one could
relate a dismal story with so many minutiae of supererogatory
wretchedness. No one could call up a _raw-head and bloody-bones_ with
so many adjuncts and circumstances of ghastliness. Mystery was his
mental element. He lived in the midst of that visionary world in which
nothing is but what is not. He dreamed with his eyes open, and saw
ghosts dancing round him at noontide. He had been in his youth
an enthusiast for liberty, and had hailed the dawn of the French
Revolution as the promise of a day that was to banish war and slavery,
and every form of vice and misery, from the face of the earth.
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