Note, in all that follows, that a load seems taken off him: after a gracious tardiness to believe up to the point of action, he is at length satisfied.

A defence was once made by a great artist for what, to the unregenerate mind, seemed the merciless tardiness of movement in one of Goethe's romances, that it was meant to impress on his readers the slow march and the tedium of events in human life.