he depression and fatigue with which most busy men are
familiar. He had been accustomed to hear himself called mad--the defence
of Turner was thought by the _dilettanti_ of the time to be possible
only to a lunatic; the author of "Stones of Venice," we saw, was insane
in the eyes of his critic, the architect; it was seriously whispered
when he wrote on Political Economy that Ruskin was out of his mind; and
so on. Every new thing he put forward "made Quintilian stare and gasp,"
and _soi-disant_ friends shake their heads, until a still newer
nine-days' wonder appeared from his pen. The break-down of 1878, so
difficult to explain to his public, made it appear that the common
reproach might after all be coming true. The recurrence of a similar
illness in 1881 and 1882 made it still more to be feared. It seemed as
though his life's work was to be invalidated by his age's failure; it
seemed that the stale, shallow reproach might only too easily be
justifiable.

These attacks of mental disease, which at his recall to Oxford seemed to
have been safely distanced, after his resignation began again at more
and more frequent intervals. Crash after crash of tempest fell upon
him--clearing away for a while only to return with fiercer fury, until
they left him beaten down and helpless at last, to learn that he must
accept the lesson and bow before the storm. Like another prophet who had
been very jealous for the Lord God of Hosts, he was to feel tempest and
earthquake and fire pass over him, before hearing the still small voice
that bade him once more take courage, and live in quietness and in
confidence, for the sake of those whom he had forgotten, when he cried,
"I, even I only, am left."

From one who has been out in the storm the reader will not expect a cool
recital of its effects. The delirium of brain-fever brings strange
things to pass; and, no doubt, afforded ground for the painful gossip,
of which there has been more than enough--much of it absurdly untrue,
the romancing of ingenious newspaper-correspondents; some of it, the
lie that is half a truth. For in these times there were not wanting
parasites such as always prey upon creatures in disease, as well as weak
admirers who misunderstood their hero's natural character, and entirely
failed to grasp his situation.

Let such troubles of the past be forgotten: all that I now remember of
many a weary night and day is the vision of a great soul in torment, and
through purgato