Except his partner in attendance, Clemency Newcome; who rousing him
with one of those favourite joints, her elbows, inquired, in a
reproachful whisper, what he laughed at.
'Not you!' said Britain.
'Who then?'
'Humanity,' said Britain. 'That's the joke!'
'What between master and them lawyers, he's getting more and more
addle-headed every day!' cried Clemency, giving him a lunge with
the other elbow, as a mental stimulant. 'Do you know where you
are? Do you want to get warning?'
'I don't know anything,' said Britain, with a leaden eye and an
immovable visage. 'I don't care for anything. I don't make out
anything. I don't believe anything. And I don't want anything.'
Although this forlorn summary of his general condition may have
been overcharged in an access of despondency, Benjamin Britain -
sometimes called Little Britain, to distinguish him from Great; as
we might say Young England, to express Old England with a decided
difference - had defined his real state more accurately than might
be supposed. For, serving as a sort of man Miles to the Doctor's
Friar Bacon, and listening day after day to innumerable orations
addressed by the Doctor to various people, all tending to show that
his very existence was at best a mistake and an absurdity, this
unfortunate servitor had fallen, by degrees, into such an abyss of
confused and contradictory suggestions from within and without,
that Truth at the bottom of her well, was on the level surface as
compared with Britain in the depths of his mystification.
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