e supreme in quality, but
in their own kind showing wonderful perfection of craftsmanship.

Of the same school, though a less exact and careful practitioner in it,
was John Addington Symonds, who was born in Bristol on the 5th of
October 1840, and died at Rome on 19th April 1893. He was the son of a
famous doctor whose name figures often in literary history, inasmuch as
he made Clifton a frequent resort for persons of consumptive tendencies.
Mr. Symonds himself lived there for a great part of his life.
Unfortunately the disease which his father had combated revenged itself
upon him; and it was only by spending the greater part of his later
years at Davos that he staved it off as long as he did. Educated at
Harrow and at Balliol, a Fellow of Magdalen, and succeeding tolerably
young to an affluent fortune, Mr. Symonds was able to indulge his
tastes, literary and other, pretty much as he chose. The result was
fortunate in one way, unfortunate in another. He could hardly have made
a living by literature, in which though an eager worker he was a
thorough dilettante. But if he had been at less liberty to write what
and howsoever he pleased, he might or rather would have been obliged to
compress and chasten the extreme prolixity and efflorescence of his
style.

His largest work, the _History of the Renaissance in Italy_, is actually
one of great value in information, thought, and style; but its extreme
redundance cannot be denied, and has indeed already necessitated a sort
of boiling down into an abstract. Both in prose essays (which he wrote
in great numbers, chiefly on Greek or Renaissance subjects) and in verse
(where he was not so successful as in prose) Mr. Symonds was one of the
most characteristic and copious members of the rather foolishly named
"aesthetic" school of the last third of the century, the school which,
originally deriving more or less from Mr. Ruskin, more and more rejected
the ethical side of his teaching. But Mr. Symonds, who had been very
much under the influence of Professor Jowett, had philosophical
velleities, which have become more generally known than they once were
through the interesting biography published after his death by Mr.
Horatio Brown. But for the redundance above mentioned, which is all
pervading with him both in thought and style, and which once suggested
to a not unfriendly critic the remark that he should like "to squeeze
him like a sponge," Symonds would probably or rather certainl