xible sense, and not to be called unto the
rigid test of reason.' We shall hardly do wrong in reckoning amongst
them this audacious claim to surpassing felicity, as we may certainly
include his boast that he 'could lose an arm without a tear, and with
few groans be quartered into pieces.' And yet, if Sir Thomas were to be
understood in the most downright literal earnest, perhaps he could have
made out as good a case for his assertion as almost any of the troubled
race of mankind. For, if we set aside external circumstances of life,
what qualities offer a more certain guarantee of happiness than those
of which he is an almost typical example? A mind endowed with an
insatiable curiosity as to all things knowable and unknowable; an
imagination which tinges with poetical hues the vast accumulation of
incoherent facts thus stored in a capacious memory; and a strangely
vivid humour that is always detecting the quaintest analogies, and, as
it were, striking light from the most unexpected collocations of
uncompromising materials: such talents are by themselves enough to
provide a man with work for life, and to make all his work delightful.
To them, moreover, we must add a disposition absolutely incapable of
controversial bitterness; 'a constitution,' as he says of himself, 'so
general that it consorts and sympathises with all things;' an absence of
all antipathies to loathsome objects in nature--to French 'dishes of
snails, frogs, and toadstools,' or to Jewish repasts on 'locusts or
grasshoppers;' an equal toleration--which in the first half of the
seventeenth century is something astonishing--for all theological
systems; an admiration even of our natural enemies, the French, the
Spaniards, the Italians, and the Dutch; a love of all climates, of all
countries; and, in short, an utter incapacity to 'absolutely detest or
hate any essence except the devil.' Indeed, his hatred even for that
personage has in it so little of bitterness, that no man, we may be
sure, would have joined more heartily in the Scotch minister's petition
for 'the puir de'il'--a prayer conceived in the very spirit of his
writings. A man so endowed--and it is not only from his explicit
assertions, but from his unconscious self-revelation, that we may credit
him with closely approaching his own ideal--is admirably qualified to
discover one great secret of human happiness. No man was ever better
prepared to keep not only one, but a whole stableful of hobbies, nor