Page 748 - ULYSSES

Ulysses

tumultuary discussions were difficultly understood and not
often nice: their testiness and outrageous mots were such
that his intellects resiled from: nor were they scrupulously
sensible of the proprieties though their fund of strong

animal spirits spoke in their behalf. But the word of Mr
Costello was an unwelcome language for him for he
nauseated the wretch that seemed to him a cropeared
creature of a misshapen gibbosity, born out of wedlock
and thrust like a crookback toothed and feet first into the
world, which the dint of the surgeon’s pliers in his skull
lent indeed a colour to, so as to put him in thought of that
missing link of creation’s chain desiderated by the late
ingenious Mr Darwin. It was now for more than the
middle span of our allotted years that he had passed
through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being
of a wary ascendancy and self a man of rare forecast, he
had enjoined his heart to repress all motions of a rising
choler and, by intercepting them with the readiest
precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude of
sufferance which base minds jeer at, rash judgers scorn and
all find tolerable and but tolerable. To those who create
themselves wits at the cost of feminine delicacy (a habit of
mind which he never did hold with) to them he would
concede neither to bear the name nor to herit the tradition

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