tion
of beauty, both artistic and moral beauty. He did live in the regions
to which he directed others. But this is vitiated by a desire for
recognition, a definite, almost a confessed, ambition. The letter, for
instance, in which he announces that he has accepted a Canonry at
Westminster is a painful one. If he felt the inexpressible distress, of
which he speaks, at the idea of leaving Marlborough, there was really
no reason why he should not have stayed; and, later on, his failure to
attain to high ecclesiastical office seems to have resulted in a sense
of compassion for the inadequacy of those who failed to discern real
merit, and a certain bitterness of spirit which, considering his
services to religion and morality, was not wholly unnatural. But he
does not seem to have tried to interpret the disappointment that he
felt, or to have asked himself whether the reason of his failure did
not rather lie in his own temperament.

The kindness of the man, his laboriousness, his fierce indignation
against moral evil, to say nothing of his extraordinary mental powers,
seem to have been clogged all through life by this sad
self-consciousness. The pity and the mystery of it is that a man should
have been so moulded to help his generation, and then that this
grievous defect of temperament should have been allowed to take its
place as the tyrant of the whole nature. And what makes the whole
situation even more tragic is that it was through a certain
transparency of nature that this egotism became apparent to others. He
was a man who seemed bound to speak of all that was in his mind; that
was a part of his rhetorical temperament. But if he could have held his
tongue, if he could have kept his own weakness of spirit concealed, he
might have achieved the very successes which he desired, and, indeed,
deserved. The result is that a richly endowed character achieves no
conspicuous greatness, either as a teacher, a speaker, a writer, or
even as a man.

The moral of these two books is this: How can any one whose character
is deeply tinged by this sort of egotism--and it is the shadow of all
eager and sensitive temperaments--best fight against it? Can it be
subdued, can it be concealed, can it be cured? I hardly dare to think
so. But I think that a man may deliberately resolve not to make
recognition an object; and next I believe he may most successfully
fight against egotism in ordinary life by regarding it mainly as a
question of man