traction to him and improved his health. He liked
dining out, because it stimulated his digestion. All human
relationships are made subservient to the same end. It never seems to
him to be a duty to minister to the pleasure of others. He takes what
he can get at the banquet of life, and, having secured his share, goes
away to digest it. When, at the end of his life, social entertainments
tried his nerves, he gave them up. When people came to see him, and he
found himself getting tired or excited by conversation, if it was not
convenient to him to leave the room, he put stoppers in his ears to
blur the sense of the talk. What better parable of the elaborate
framework of egotism on which his life was constructed could there be
than the following legend, not derived from the book? One evening, the
story goes, the philosopher had invited, at his club, a youthful
stranger to join him in a game of billiards. The young man, who was a
proficient, ran out in two breaks, leaving his rival a hopeless
distance behind. When he had finished, Spencer, with a severe air, said
to him: "To play billiards in an ordinary manner is an agreeable
adjunct to life; to play as you have been playing is evidence of a
misspent youth." A man who was not an egotist and a philosopher,
however much he disliked the outcome of the game, would have attempted
some phrases of commendation. But Spencer's view was, that anything
which rendered a player of billiards less useful to himself, by giving
him fewer opportunities in the course of a game for what he would have
called healthful and pleasurable recreation, was not only not to be
tolerated, but was to be morally reprobated.

As to his health, a subject which occupies the larger part of the
volumes, it is evident that, though his nervous system was deranged, he
was a complete hypochondriac. There is very little repining about the
invalid conditions under which he lived; and it gradually dawned upon
me that this was not because he had resolved to bear it in a stoical
and courageous manner, but because his ill-health, seen through the
rosy spectacles of the egotist, was a matter of pleasurable excitement
to him; he complains a good deal of the peculiar sensations he
experienced, and his broken nights, but with a solemn satisfaction in
the whole experience. He never had to bear physical pain, and the worst
evil from which he suffered was the boredom resulting from the way in
which he had to try, or conceived