t what the critics tell him that he ought to feel. No criticism
can be really valuable which does not fulfil those conditions. I must
admit, however, that a collection of his remarks would include a good
many observations rather startling to believers in the conventional
judgments. Purely literary qualities impress him very little unless they
are associated with some serious purpose. He shows the same sort of
independence which enabled him to accept a solitary position in
religious and political matters. In private letters, moreover, he does
not think it necessary to insist upon the fact, which he would have
fully admitted, that the great object of criticism is always the critic
himself. A man who says that he can't see, generally proves that he is
blind, not that there is no light. If only for this reason, I would not
quote phrases which would sound unduly crude or even arrogant when taken
as absolute judgments, instead of being, as they often are, confessions
of indifference in the form of condemnations. When a great writer really
appeals to him, he shows no want of enthusiasm. During the enforced rest
in 1885 he studied Spanish with great zeal; he calls it a 'glorious
language,' and had the proverbial reward of being enabled to read 'Don
Quixote' in the original. 'Don Quixote,' he says, had always attracted
him, even in the translations, to a degree for which he cannot quite
account. His explanation, however, is apparently adequate, and certainly
characteristic. He sees in Cervantes a man of noble and really
chivalrous nature, who looks kindly upon the extravagance which
caricatures his own qualities, but also sees clearly that the highest
morality is that which is in conformity with plain reason and common
sense. Beneath the ridicule of the romances there is the strongest
sympathy with all that is really noble.

After Spanish and Cervantes, Fitzjames turned to Italian and Dante.
Dante, too, roused his enthusiasm, and he observes, quaintly enough,
that he means to be as familiar with the 'Divina Commedia' as he once
was with Bentham--two authors rarely brought into contact. Dante
conquered him the more effectually by entering over the ruins of Milton.
Some years before he had pronounced the 'Paradise Lost' to be 'poor,
contradictory, broken-down stuff, so far as the story goes.' He inferred
that 'poetry was too slight an affair to grapple with such an awful
subject.' He had, however, already read Dante in Cary's trans