honours his youth, cares, dreams--his mind, and his heart,
and his soul. He was a silent but intense enthusiast in the priesthood
he had entered. From LITERATURE he imagined had come all that makes
nations enlightened and men humane. And he loved Literature the more,
because her distinctions were not those of the world--because she had
neither ribbands, nor stars, nor high places at her command. A name in
the deep gratitude and hereditary delight of men--this was the title
she bestowed. Hers was the Great Primitive Church of the world, without
Popes or Muftis--sinecures, pluralities and hierarchies. Her servants
spoke to the earth as the prophets of old, anxious only to be heard and
believed. Full of this fanaticism, Ernest Maltravers pursued his way
in the great procession of the myrtle-bearers to the sacred shrine.
He carried the thyrsus, and he believed in the god. By degrees his
fanaticism worked in him the philosophy which De Montaigne would have
derived from sober calculation; it made him indifferent to the thorns in
the path, to the storms in the sky. He learned to despise the enmity he
provoked, the calumnies that assailed him. Sometimes he was silent, but
sometimes he retorted. Like a soldier who serves a cause, he believed
that when the cause was injured in his person, the weapons confided to
his hands might be wielded without fear and without reproach. Gradually
he became feared as well as known. And while many abused him, none could
contemn.

It would not suit the design of this work to follow Maltravers step by
step in his course. I am only describing the principal events, not the
minute details, of his intellectual life. Of the character of his
works it will be enough to say that, whatever their faults, they were
original--they were his own. He did not write according to copy, nor
compile from commonplace books. He was an artist, it is true,--for what
is genius itself but art? but he took laws, and harmony, and order,
from the great code of Truth and Nature: a code that demands intense and
unrelaxing study--though its first principles are few and simple: that
study Maltravers did not shrink from. It was a deep love of truth that
made him a subtle and searching analyst, even in what the dull world
considers trifles; for he knew that nothing in literature is in itself
trifling--that it is often but a hairsbreadth that divides a truism from
a discovery. He was the more original, because he sought rather after