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Scalawag on the Web Sectory 05
Page 05
Upon reaching Tarentum he began to make preparations to carry on the war with activity. The Tarentines soon found they had obtained a master rather than an ally. He shut up the theatre and all other public places, and compelled their young men to serve in his ranks. Notwithstanding all his activity, the Romans were first in the field. The Consul M. Valerius Laevinus marched into Lucania; but as the army of Pyrrhus was inferior to that of the Romans, he attempted to gain time by negotiation in order that he might be joined by his Italian allies. He accordingly wrote to the Consul, offering to arbitrate between Rome and the Italian states; but Laevinus bluntly told him to mind his own business and retire to Epirus. Fearing to remain inactive any longer, although he was not yet joined by his allies, Pyrrhus marched out against the Romans with his own troops and the Tarentines.
Except in the pairing time, the old males usually live by themselves. The old females and the immature males, on the other hand, are often met with in twos and threes; and the former occasionally have young with them, though the pregnant females usually separate themselves, and sometimes remain apart after they have given birth to their offspring. The young Orangs seem to remain unusually long under their mother's protection, probably in consequence of their slow growth. While climbing the mother always carries her young against her bosom, the young holding on by the mother's hair. At what time of life the Orang-Utan becomes capable of propagation, and how long the females go with young is unknown, but it is probable that they are not adult until they arrive at ten or fifteen years of age. A female which lived for five years at Batavia had not attained one-third the height of the wild females. It is probable that, after reaching adult years, they go on growing, though slowly, and that they live to forty or fifty years. The Dyaks tell of old Orangs which have not only lost all their teeth, but which find it so troublesome to climb that they maintain themselves on windfalls and juicy herbage.
Browning, on the other hand, kept his raptures and his processes severely to himself. He never seems to have given the smallest hint as to how he conceived a poem or worked it out. He was as reticent about his occupation as a well-bred stockbroker, and did his best in society to give the impression of a perfectly decorous and conventional gentleman, telling strings of not very interesting anecdotes, and making a great point of being ordinary. Indeed, I believe that Browning was haunted by the eighteenth-century idea that there was something not quite respectable about professional literature, and that, like Gray, he wished to be considered a private gentleman who wrote for his amusement. When in later years he took a holiday, he went not for secret contemplation, but to recover from social fatigue. Browning is really one of the most mysterious figures in literature in this respect, because his inner life of poetry was so entirely apart from his outer life of dinnerparties and afternoon calls. Inside the sacred enclosure, the winds of heaven blow, the thunder rolls; he proclaims the supreme worth of human passion, he dives into the disgraceful secrets of the soul: and then he comes out of his study a courteous and very proper gentleman, looking like a retired diplomatist, and talking like an intelligent commercial traveller--a man whose one wish appeared to be as good-humouredly like everyone else as he conveniently could.
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