that he had to try, to kill time
without reading or working.

Of course one cannot help admiring the tenacious way in which he
carried out his great work under unfavourable conditions. Yet there is
something ridiculous in the picture of his rowing about in a boat on
the Regent's Park Lake, with an amanuensis in the stern, dictating
under the lee of an island until his sensations returned, and then
rowing until they subsided again. As a hedonist, he distinctly
calculated that his work gave the spice to his life, and that he would
not have been so happy had he relinquished it. But there is nothing
generous or noble about his standpoint; he liked writing and
philosophising, and he preferred to do it even though it entailed a
certain amount of invalidism, in the same spirit in which a man prefers
to drink champagne with the prospect of suffering from the gout, rather
than to renounce champagne and gout alike.

The man's face is in itself a parable. He has the high, domed forehead
of the philosopher, and a certain geniality of eye; but the hard,
thin-lipped mouth, with the deep lines from the nose, give him the air
of an elderly chimpanzee. He has a hand like a bird's claw; and the
antique shirt-front and small bow-tie denote the man who has fixed his
opinions on the cut of his clothes at an early date and does not intend
to modify them. Quite apart from the intense seriousness with which the
sage took himself, down to the smallest details, the style of the book,
dry as it is, is in itself grotesquely attractive.

There is something in the use of solemn scientific terminology, when
dealing with the most trivial matters, which makes many passages
irresistibly ludicrous. I wish that I could think that the writer of
the following lines wrote them with any consciousness of how humorous a
passage he was constructing--

"With me any tendency towards facetiousness is the result of temporary
elation, either . . . caused by pleasurable health-giving change, or
more commonly by meeting old friends. Habitually I observed that on
seeing the Lotts after a long interval, I was apt to give vent to some
witticisms during the first hour or two, and then they became rare."

I can't say that the life is a sad one, because, on the whole, it is a
contented one; but it is so one-sided and so self-absorbed that one
feels dried-up and depressed by it. One feels that great ability, great
perseverance, may yet leave a man very cold and hard