on the bosom, so to speak, of society in general;
and society in general flung him back in wondering contempt.

His clever contemporaries would naturally, under the pressure of the
moment, concentrate their critical attention upon the weakest part of
his genius--that is to say upon his reforming theories and large
world-shaking speculations--while the portion of him that interests
us now would merely strike them as tiresome and irrelevant.

He grew more and more lonely as he neared his end. It might be said
that he deserved this fate; he who refused to accept even the
responsibility of paternity. But one cannot resist a certain
satisfaction in noting how the high-placed society people who came
to visit him as he sat in his attic, copying music for a livelihood,
were driven from his door.

The great Sentimentalist must have had his exquisite memories,
even then, as he sat brooding over his dull mechanical work, he
whose burning eloquence about Liberty and Justice and Simplicity
and Nature was already sowing the seed of the earthquake.

Queer memories he must have had of his early tramp life through
the roads and villages of France; of his conversations with the
sceptical Hume among the hills of Derbyshire; of his sweet romantic
sojournings in old historic houses, and his strange passions and fatal
loves. But the rarest of his memories must have been of those hours
and days when, in the pastoral seclusion of some cherished
hiding-place, he let the world go by and sank, among patient leaves and
flowers that could not mock him, into his own soul and the soul of
nature.

He has been hugely vituperated by evolutionary philosophers for his
mania for the "age of gold" and his disbelief in progress.

One of his favourite themes that civilisation is a curse and not a
blessing excited the derision of his best friends. Others said that he
stole the idea. But we may be sure that as he copied his daily portion
of music with the civilisation of the Salons clamouring unheeded
around him, his mind reverted rather to those exquisite moments
when he had been happy alone, than to all the triumphs of his genius.

He was just the type that the world would naturally persecute.
Devoid of any sparkling wit, devoid of any charm of manner,
singularly devoid of the least sense of proportion, he lent himself to
every sort of social rancour. He was one of those persons who take
themselves seriously, and that, in his world as in the world of