hoto-print of a very creditable bust which he modelled of his uncle.
He had a musical ear, and practiced singing. He paid attention to
style, and was not wholly insensible to poetry. Yet in all his
dealings with the art-products of mankind he manifests the same curious
dryness and mechanical literality of judgment--a dryness increased by
pride in his non-conformity. He would, for example, rather give a
large sum than read to the end of Homer's Iliad,--the ceaseless
repetition of battles, speeches, and epithets like well-greaved Greeks,
horse-breaking Trojans; the tedious enumeration of details of dresses,
arms, and chariots; such absurdities as giving the genealogy of a horse
while in the midst of a battle; and the appeals to savage and brutal
passions, having soon made the poem intolerable to him (vol. i, page
300). Turner's paintings he finds untrue, in that the earth-region is
habitually as bright in tone as the air-region. Moreover, Turner
scatters his detail too evenly. In Greek statues the hair is falsely
treated. Renaissance painting, even the best, is spoiled by unreal
illumination, and non-rendering of reflected light in the shadows.
Venetian gothic sins by meaningless ornamentation. St. Mark's Church
may be precious archaeologically, but is not aesthetically precious.
Of Wagner's music he admires nothing but the skilful specialization of
the instruments in the orchestra.

The fault-finding in all these cases rests on observation, true as far
as it goes; but the total absence of genial relations with the entirety
of the phenomenon discussed, the clutching at some paltry mechanical
aspect of it that lends itself to reasoned proof by _a_ plus _b_, and
the practical denial of everything that only appeals to vaguer
sentiment, show a mind so oddly limited to ratiocinative and explicit
processes, and so wedded to the superficial and flagrantly
_insufficient_, that one begins to wonder whether in the philosophic
and scientific spheres the same mind can have wrought out results of
extraordinary value.

Both "yes" and "no" are here the answer. Every one who writes books or
articles knows how he must flounder until he hits upon the proper
opening. Once the right beginning found, everything follows easily and
in due order. If a man, however narrow, strikes even by accident, into
one of these fertile openings, and pertinaciously follows the lead, he
is almost sure to meet truth on his path. Some thoughts act a