Hellenists that are occasionally seen in modern
times. He might have turned to the mediaeval period. He had an eye
for cloisters and nuns. His fancy would have been struck with the
grotesqueness of many of the ideas and institutions of those times.
He would have got on finely with Gurth the swineherd and Burgundy the
tusk-toothed, and one of his masterly witticisms would have upset Duns
Scotus. Perhaps, of all the mediaeval characters, he would have been
most smitten with the court fool, and, if he could have been seated at
a princely table of the twelfth century, the bowl surely would not have
been round many times before he and the fool would have had a few passes
at each other. There was enough in the Middle Ages to have fascinated
him; and could he, like some romantic Novalis, have once penetrated
thither, and tasted the fruit, he would have found it a lotus, and
would have wished never to depart. His soul would have clung to church
architecture,--under which term may be included all the religious,
political, poetical, moral, and practical life of the Middle Ages. The
accident in the case, however, was, that his uncle's library did not
contain the Greeks, nor the Middle Ages, but did contain the old English
authors. These he mastered; and out of these he created his ideals. In
the affluent vigor of the Elizabethan age, in the buoyant _neglige_ of
the times of merry Charles, he found people that he liked. To every
reflective and slightly scholastic mind, there is a charm in looking
at things in the distance. The perspective fits the eye. This may have
helped the enthusiasm with which he looked upon the writers and heroes
of the old English literature; but its principal cause was their
open-heartedness, their informality, their stout and free humanity
underneath laces and uniform.

Having thus found his place in literature, he began also to be rich in
friends, and his life was devoted every moment to thought and affection.
The time that he passed at the desk of the India House was time in which
he did not live; or perhaps, while he autographed the mercantile books,
there was a higher half-conscious life of the fancy which lightly
flitted round and round the steady course of his pen. He thus exults,
after his emancipation from his clerkship upon a pension:--"I came
home FOREVER on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my
condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity.
Every year to b