impulse is
once started, human beings go too fast, and want to carry out their new
discoveries of rules and principles too far: and you must have a regulating
force: and if you can find a better force than the instinct for what is
beautiful, tell me, and I'll undertake to talk for at least as long about
it. I must stop! My sense of beauty warns me that I am becoming a bore."

XXXVI

OF BIOGRAPHY

Father Payne broke out suddenly after dinner to two or three of us about a
book he had been reading.

"It's called a _Life_," he said, "at the top of every page almost. I
don't wonder the author felt it necessary to remind you--or perhaps he was
reminding himself? I can see him," said Father Payne, "saying to himself
with a rueful expression, 'This is a Life, undoubtedly!' Why, the waxworks
of Madame Tussaud are models of vivacity and agility compared to it. I
never set eyes on such a book!"

"Why on earth did you go on reading it?" said I.

"Well may you ask!" said Father Payne. "It's one of my weaknesses; if I
begin a book, I can put it down if it is moderately good; but if it is
either very good or very bad, I can't get out of it--I feel like a wasp in
a honey-pot. I make faint sticky motions of flight--but on I go."

"Whose life was it?" I said, laughing.

"I hardly know," said Father Payne. "It leaves on my mind the impression of
his having been a decent old party enough. I think he must have been a
general merchant--he seems to have had pretty nearly everything on hand. He
wrote books, I gather"; and Father Payne groaned.

"What were they about?" I said.

"I don't know, I'm sure," said Father Payne. "History and stuff--literary
essays, and people's influence, perhaps. He went in for accounting for
things, I fancy, and explaining things away. There were extracts which
alienated my attention faster than any extracts I ever read. I could not
keep my mind on them. God preserve me from ever falling in with any of his
books; I should spend days in reading them! He travelled too--he was always
travelling. Why couldn't he leave Europe alone? He has left his trail all
over Europe, like a snail. He has defiled all the finest scenery on the
Continent. But, by Jove, he met his match in his biographer; he has been
accounted for all right. And yet I feel that it was rather hard on him. If
_he_ could have held his tongue about things in general, and if his
biographer could have held his tongue about _him_, it would have