o vivid a sense that any and
every dogma is but one side of an inevitable antinomy. Strong
convictions are needed for the ordinary controversial successes, and his
favourite point of view is the centre from which all convictions radiate
and all look equally probable. But then, instead of mocking at all, he
sympathises with all, and expresses the one sentiment which may be
extracted from their collision--the sentiment of reverence blended with
scepticism. It is a contradictory sentiment, one may say, in a sense,
but the essence of humour is to be contradictory. The language in which
he utters himself was determined by his omnivorous appetite for every
quaint or significant symbol to be discovered in the whole field of
learning. With no prejudices, nothing comes amiss to him; and the
signature of some mysterious principle may be found in every object of
art or nature. Science in its infancy was still half mystic, and the
facts which he gathered were all tinged with the semi-mythical fancies
of the earliest explorers of the secrets of nature. In an old relic,
recalling 'the drums and tramplings of three conquests,' in a queer
annual, or an ancient fragment of history might be the appropriate
emblem, or something more than the emblem of a truth equally impressive
to the scientific and the poetical imagination. He would have been happy
by the midnight lamp in Milton's 'high lonely tower;' but his humour
would look at the romances which Milton loved rather with the eyes of
Cervantes than of Milton. Their tone of sentiment would be too strained
and highflown; and he would prefer to read of the spirits that are found

'In fire, air, flood, or underground,'

or to try to penetrate the secret of

'Every star that heaven doth show,
And every herb that sips the dew,'

by reading all the nonsense that had been written about them in the dawn
of inquiry. He should be read in a corresponding spirit. One should
often stop to appreciate the full flavour of some quaint allusion, or
lay down the book to follow out some diverging line of thought. So read
in a retired study, or beneath the dusty shelves of an ancient library,
a page of Sir Thomas seems to revive the echoes as of ancient chants in
college chapels, strangely blended with the sonorous perorations of
professors in the neighbouring schools, so that the interferences
sometimes produce a note of gentle mockery and sometimes heighten
solemnity by quaintness.

That