ole merit lies in skill.
In the fine arts the student uses skill to produce something beautiful.
He is free to choose what that something shall be, and the layman claims
that he may and must judge the artist chiefly by the value in beauty of
the thing done. Artistic skill contributes to beauty, or it would not be
skill; but beauty is the result of many elements, and the nobler the art
the lower is the rank which skill takes among them.'

A clear and matter-of-fact thinker, Jenkin was an equally clear and
graphic writer. He read the best literature, preferring, among other
things, the story of David, the ODYSSEY, the ARCADIA, the saga of Burnt
Njal, and the GRAND CYRUS. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ariosto,
Boccaccio, Scott, Dumas, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, were
some of his favourite authors. He once began a review of George Eliot's
biography, but left it unfinished. Latterly he had ceased to admire
her work as much as before. He was a rapid, fluent talker, with excited
utterance at times. Some of his sayings were shrewd and sharp; but
he was sometimes aggressive. 'People admire what is pretty in an ugly
thing,' he used to say 'not the ugly thing.' A lady once said to him she
would never be happy again. 'What does that signify?' cried Jenkin; 'we
are not here to be happy, but to be good.' On a friend remarking that
Salvini's acting in OTHELLO made him want to pray, Jenkin answered,
'That is prayer.'

Though admired and liked by his intimates, Jenkin was never popular with
associates. His manner was hard, rasping, and unsympathetic. 'Whatever
virtues he possessed,' says Mr. Stevenson, 'he could never count on
being civil.' He showed so much courtesy to his wife, however, that a
Styrian peasant who observed it spread a report in the village that Mrs.
Jenkin, a great lady, had married beneath her. At the Saville Club,
in London, he was known as the 'man who dines here and goes up to
Scotland.' Jenkin was conscious of this churlishness, and latterly
improved. 'All my life,' he wrote,'I have talked a good deal, with the
almost unfailing result of making people sick of the sound of my
tongue. It appeared to me that I had various things to say, and I had
no malevolent feelings; but, nevertheless, the result was that expressed
above. Well, lately some change has happened. If I talk to a person one
day they must have me the next. Faces light up when they see me. "Ah!
I say, come here." "Come and dine with me."