alent which glitters to-day that it may
dine and sleep well to-morrow; and society is officered by men of parts,
as they are properly called, and not by divine men. These use their
gifts to refine luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic,
and piety, and love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and
they find beauty in rites and bounds that resist it.

We have found out fine names to cover our sensuality withal, but no
gifts can raise intemperance. The man of talent affects to call his
transgressions of the laws of the senses trivial and to count them
nothing considered with his devotion to his art. His art never taught
him lewdness, nor the love of wine, nor the wish to reap where he had
not sowed. His art is less for every deduction from his holiness, and
less for every defect of common sense. On him who scorned the world as
he said, the scorned world wreaks its revenge. He that despiseth small
things will perish by little and little. Goethe's Tasso is very likely
to be a pretty fair historical portrait, and that is true tragedy. It
does not seem to me so genuine grief when some tyrannous Richard the
Third oppresses and slays a score of innocent persons, as when Antonio
and Tasso, both apparently right, wrong each other. One living after the
maxims of this world and consistent and true to them, the other fired
with all divine sentiments, yet grasping also at the pleasures of sense,
without submitting to their law. That is a grief we all feel, a knot we
cannot untie. Tasso's is no infrequent case in modern biography. A
man of genius, of an ardent temperament, reckless of physical
laws, self-indulgent, becomes presently unfortunate, querulous, a
"discomfortable cousin," a thorn to himself and to others.

The scholar shames us by his bifold life. Whilst something higher than
prudence is active, he is admirable; when common sense is wanted, he is
an encumbrance. Yesterday, Caesar was not so great; to-day, the felon
at the gallows' foot is not more miserable. Yesterday, radiant with the
light of an ideal world in which he lives, the first of men; and now
oppressed by wants and by sickness, for which he must thank himself. He
resembles the pitiful drivellers whom travellers describe as frequenting
the bazaars of Constantinople, who skulk about all day, yellow,
emaciated, ragged, sneaking; and at evening, when the bazaars are open,
slink to the opium-shop, swallow their morsel and become tranquil and
g