others with a generous
eye of admiration, not with the smallness of the seeker after faults. If
there shone anywhere a virtue, no matter how incongruously set, it was
upon the virtue we must fix our eyes. I remember having found much
entertainment in Voltaire's "Sauel," and telling him what seemed to me
the drollest touches. He heard me out, as usual when displeased, and
then opened fire on me with red-hot shot. To belittle a noble story was
easy; it was not literature, it was not art, it was not morality; there
was no sustenance in such a form of jesting, there was (in his favourite
phrase) "no nitrogenous food" in such literature. And then he proceeded
to show what a fine fellow David was; and what a hard knot he was in
about Bathsheba, so that (the initial wrong committed) honour might well
hesitate in the choice of conduct; and what owls those people were who
marvelled because an Eastern tyrant had killed Uriah, instead of
marvelling that he had not killed the prophet also. "Now if Voltaire had
helped me to feel that," said he, "I could have seen some fun in it." He
loved the comedy which shows a hero human, and yet leaves him a hero;
and the laughter which does not lessen love.

It was this taste for what is fine in humankind that ruled his choice in
books. These should all strike a high note, whether brave or tender, and
smack of the open air. The noble and simple presentation of things noble
and simple, that was the "nitrogenous food" of which he spoke so much,
which he sought so eagerly, enjoyed so royally. He wrote to an author,
the first part of whose story he had seen with sympathy, hoping that it
might continue in the same vein. "That this may be so," he wrote, "I
long with the longing of David for the water of Bethlehem. But no man
need die for the water a poet can give, and all can drink it to the end
of time, and their thirst be quenched and the pool never dry--and the
thirst and the water are both blessed." It was in the Greeks
particularly that he found this blessed water; he loved "a fresh air"
which he found "about the Greek things even in translations"; he loved
their freedom from the mawkish and the rancid. The tale of David in the
Bible, the "Odyssey," Sophocles, AEschylus, Shakespeare, Scott; old Dumas
in his chivalrous note; Dickens rather than Thackeray, and the "Tale of
Two Cities" out of Dickens: such were some of his preferences. To
Ariosto and Boccaccio he was always faithful; "Burnt Njal" w