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"Consider, too, that all the pleasant little dim ideas and complacencies -- of standing well with Timpson, of dispensing advice when he was asked for it, of impressing his friend Tulliver with additional respect, of saying something and saying it emphatically, with other inappreciably minute ingredients that went along with the warm hearth and the brandy and water to make up Mr Riley's consciousness on this occasion, would have been a mere blank."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Author

The Mill on the Floss

Place of Publication

Edinburgh and London

Publisher

William Blackwood and Sons

Date

1860

Metaphor

"Consider, too, that all the pleasant little dim ideas and complacencies -- of standing well with Timpson, of dispensing advice when he was asked for it, of impressing his friend Tulliver with additional respect, of saying something and saying it emphatically, with other inappreciably minute ingredients that went along with the warm hearth and the brandy and water to make up Mr Riley's consciousness on this occasion, would have been a mere blank."

Metaphor in Context

If you blame Mr Riley very severely for giving a recommendation on such slight grounds, I must say you are rather hard upon him. Why should an auctioneer and appraiser thirty years ago, who had as good as forgotten his free-school Latin, be expected to manifest a delicate scrupulosity which is not always exhibited by gentlemen of the learned professions even in our present advanced stage of morality? Besides, a man with the milk of human kindness in him can scarcely abstain from doing a good-natured action, and one can't be good-natured all round. Nature herself occasionally quarters an inconvenient parasite on an animal towards whom she has otherwise no ill-will. What then? We admire her care for the parasite. If Mr Riley had shrunk from giving a recommendation that was not based on valid evidence, he would not have helped Mr Stelling to a paying pupil, and that would not have been so well for the reverend gentleman. Consider, too, that all the pleasant little dim ideas and complacencies -- of standing well with Timpson, of dispensing advice when he was asked for it, of impressing his friend Tulliver with additional respect, of saying something and saying it emphatically, with other inappreciably minute ingredients that went along with the warm hearth and the brandy and water to make up Mr Riley's consciousness on this occasion, would have been a mere blank. (p. 30)