subtle education, for it
persuaded insensibly to a conception of my own. How, if he would not
define, could I know what things were and what were not worthy of his
gentle and implacable judgment? I must needs judge them for myself, yet
he constrained me in the judging. Within that constraint and under that
stimulus, which seemed to touch the ultimate springs of thoughts before
they sprang, I began to discern all things in literature and in life--in
the chastity of letters and in the honour of life--that I was bound to
love. Not the things of one character only, but excellent things of
every character. There was no tyranny in such a method. His idleness
justified itself by the liberality it permitted to his taste. Never
having made his love of letters further a secondary purpose, never having
bound the literary genius--that delicate Ariel--to any kind of servitude,
never having so much as permitted himself a prejudice whereby some of his
delights should be stinted while others were indulged beyond the
sanctions of modest reason, he barely tolerated his own preferences,
which lay somewhat on the hither side of full effectiveness of style.
These the range of his reading confessed by certain exclusions.
Nevertheless it was not of deficiencies that he was patient: he did but
respect the power of pause, and he disliked violence chiefly because
violence is apt to confess its own limits. Perhaps, indeed, his own fine
negatives made him only the more sensible of any lack of those literary
qualities that are bound in their full complement to hold themselves at
the disposal of the consummate author--to stand and wait, if they may do
no more.

Men said that he led a _dilettante_ life. They reproached him with the
selflessness that made him somewhat languid. Others, they seemed to
aver, were amateurs at this art or that; he was an amateur at living. So
it was, in the sense that he never grasped at happiness, and that many of
the things he had held slipped from his disinterested hands. So it was,
too, in this unintended sense; he loved life. How should he not have
loved a life that his living made honourable? How should he not have
loved all arts, in which his choice was delicate, liberal, instructed,
studious, docile, austere? An amateur man he might have been called,
too, because he was not discomposed by his own experiences, or shaken by
the discovery which life brings to us-that the negative quality of which
Buddh