. But his
words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a
spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol,
but still joyful; and the reader will find there a _caput-mortuum_ of
piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its
essentials; and these two qualities make him a wholesome, as his
intellectual vigour makes him a bracing, writer. I should be much of a
hound if I lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer.

"Goethe's Life," by Lewes, had a great importance for me when it first
fell into my hands--a strange instance of the partiality of man's good
and man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire than Goethe; he seems a
very epitome of the sins of genius, breaking open the doors of private
life, and wantonly wounding friends, in that crowning offence of
"Werther," and in his own character a mere pen-and-ink Napoleon,
conscious of the rights and duties of superior talents as a Spanish
inquisitor was conscious of the rights and duties of his office. And yet
in his fine devotion to his art, in his honest and serviceable
friendship for Schiller, what lessons are contained! Biography, usually
so false to its office, does here for once perform for us some of the
work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue of
man's nature, and how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit and
persevere in the same character. History serves us well to this effect,
but in the originals, not in the pages of the popular epitomiser, who is
bound, by the very nature of his task, to make us feel the difference of
epochs instead of the essential identity of man, and even in the
originals only to those who can recognise their own human virtues and
defects in strange forms, often inverted and under strange names, often
interchanged. Martial is a poet of no good repute, and it gives a man
new thoughts to read his works dispassionately, and find in this
unseemly jester's serious passages the image of a kind, wise, and
self-respecting gentleman. It is customary, I suppose, in reading
Martial, to leave out these pleasant verses; I never heard of them, at
least, until I found them for myself; and this partiality is one among a
thousand things that help to build up our distorted and hysterical
conception of the great Roman empire.

This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book--the
"Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, the noble
forgetful