ave been said of all impressive speech; of all
representation or inculcation more oratorical in its character than a
sum in arithmetic. An article of Bingham's in the first number of the
_Westminster Review_, in which he offered as an explanation of something
which he disliked in Moore, that "Mr. Moore _is_ a poet, and therefore
is _not_ a reasoner," did a good deal to attach the notion of hating
poetry to the writers in the _Review_. But the truth was that many of us
were great readers of poetry; Bingham himself had been a writer of it,
while as regards me (and the same thing might be said of my father), the
correct statement would be, not that I disliked poetry, but that I was
theoretically indifferent to it. I disliked any sentiments in poetry
which I should have disliked in prose; and that included a great deal.
And I was wholly blind to its place in human culture, as a means of
educating the feelings. But I was always personally very susceptible to
some kinds of it. In the most sectarian period of my Benthamism, I
happened to look into Pope's _Essay on Man_, and, though every opinion
in it was contrary to mine, I well remember how powerfully it acted on
my imagination. Perhaps at that time poetical composition of any higher
type than eloquent discussion in verse, might not have produced a
similar effect upon me: at all events I seldom gave it an opportunity.
This, however, was a mere passive state. Long before I had enlarged in
any considerable degree the basis of my intellectual creed, I had
obtained, in the natural course of my mental progress, poetic culture of
the most valuable kind, by means of reverential admiration for the lives
and characters of heroic persons; especially the heroes of philosophy.
The same inspiring effect which so many of the benefactors of mankind
have left on record that they had experienced from Plutarch's _Lives_,
was produced on me by Plato's pictures of Socrates, and by some modern
biographies, above all by Condorcet's _Life of Turgot_; a book well
calculated to rouse the best sort of enthusiasm, since it contains one
of the wisest and noblest of lives, delineated by one of the wisest and
noblest of men. The heroic virtue of these glorious representatives of
the opinions with which I sympathized, deeply affected me, and I
perpetually recurred to them as others do to a favourite poet, when
needing to be carried up into the more elevated regions of feeling and
thought. I may observe by t