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some as a boy,' &c., is borne out by such passages as this from Dorothy Wordsworth :-' Coleridge did not keep to the high road, but leapt over a gate and bounded down the pathless field.' And then as to the portrait, 'A noticeable man with large grey eyes,' &c. It is not quite inconceivable that Wordsworth should have spoken of himself as 'noticeable'; but the large grey eye,' 'pale face,' and 'low-hung lip,' are certainly Coleridge. The lines about the withered flower' and the 'sinful creature' seem to mean only that Wordsworth would sometimes go for very long walks, and come back exhausted.

4th. These morning frosts are a little disconcerting, but, the weather being dry, no harm has yet been done to the fruit-trees. Dined at -'s. I sat by a lady who talked not amiss about Spinoza, but by some mischance always called him 'Spinola.' I suppose one day's acquaintance with one book about him had left him still something of a stranger. I know no reason why ladies should not try to be philosophers, but I suspect that in most cases they find cheerfulness is always breaking in.' After all, it need only be for one season. But for my own part, as I cannot go from house to house and pick up the phrases, but must dig in my mind for thoughts and recollections, I prefer to discuss my philosophy in the smoking- rather than the dining-room. Nature abhors a divided concoction. And so when my fair partner, after despatching Spinola with her entrée, turned on me with a 'Tell me now, do you honestly think Green has added anything to Marsilio Ficino?' I replied, 'Well, not more than Gray has added to Guido Cavalcanti, or Black to Jacopo Sannazzaro.' How odd it is people will be pretentious! Perhaps it is as well, for, if all had the courage of their ignorance, the world would be a much duller place. The heavy plunger is a joy for ever; but ladies should be more cautious. There is a story I once heard in Oxford, that hot-bed of apocrypha, about a literary gentleman from town who was introduced to Professor -, and fell on his neck with I have so longed to know you ever since I read your charming edition of Heraclitus.' Unfortunately, when Heraclitus was named, his father did not. know he would have to run in double harness with Democritus ; and the weeping philosopher himself did not anticipate so 'charming' an Isis as the Oxford Professor to collect his scattered fragments, or he would have endeavoured to make them charming too. As it is, they consist of dark sayings which, when emendation

1 'Nec cultura placet longior annuâ.'-HOR.

has done its utmost, are conjectured to mean things like 'Dry light is the best.'

11th.-I brought Sophia and Eugenia to Kent a week ago for their spring whiff of ozone, and (I fear) for my spring bilious attack. However, I stave it off from day to day by much bicycling. Yesterday I rode to Faversham, the scene of the famous murder chronicled in the old play Arden of Feversham,' taking the pretty little reprint in my pocket. I agree with the editor, the Rev. Mr. Bayne, against Mr. Swinburne, that the writing is not Shakespeare's. To the arguments which he adduces I should incline to add that Shakespeare would not have allowed in a play of his a villain by the name of Shakebag.

12th. Venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus.' Home.

13th.-A fall of snow at breakfast; along the downs it lies an inch thick. This is cheerful for the farmers. The cause of my sudden retreat has worked itself off, and the bachelor feeling of emancipation which succeeded has gone too, and I must confess to feeling lonely. The true bachelor's solace is champagne. When a button comes off,' said my friend, 'I open a bottle of champagne and fasten it on with the wire, which is both needle and thread in one.' But my doctor will not let me drink champagne; so the buttons of my bachelordom cannot be so conveniently attached.

They say the Duchesse d'Alençon would not escape from the terrible fire at the Paris Charity Bazaar, on the ground that it was her duty and privilege to go last. Why is it always of French women, not of French men, that one hears these stories of high-bred heroism? - told me the other day of an ancestress of his, at a French convent school, who was saved from the guillotine during the Terror by her French companions insisting, though with most courteous apologies, upon preceding her to execution, so as to give her a chance of an expected reprieve, which at last came.

16th. The Jowett biography, which I finished to-day, seems a capital piece of work, especially the second volume. It keeps the best side of its hero prominent, without obscuring the fact that there were other sides. Perhaps most readers will rise from its perusal with the conviction that Jowett was at once more kind, more pious, and more heterodox than they had imagined; a man to love and revere and burn. Most great heretics have been persons of singular piety and charm. Jowett was not definite enough in his positions to have disciples; or if he may be allowed

one, still he has no disciple. But he cannot be acquitted of an influence upon his young men like that for which the wise Athenians got rid of Socrates. Whether Jowett believed any religious truth that was not held by Plato seems doubtful. When he was Vice-Chancellor he walked home one Sunday with the University preacher (who told me the story) and gave him many reasons against the doctrine of immortality, which the preacher had, in his poor Christian way, been urging in the pulpit. After luncheon the preacher started for his train to town, but, his conscience pricking him that he had been silent under Jowett's attack, he returned in haste to the Master's lodgings and delivered his soul: Master, I ought to have said that I did not agree with the views you expressed this morning.' To which the Master chirruped: 'I know; good-bye; you'll lose your train.' It is curious to observe that the Quarterly, once so savage and tartarly, vies in eulogy with the Edinburgh, and spends its strength in hammering out thin Mr. Abbott's comparison between Jowett and Johnson. Jowett, who knew his Shakespeare, would have paralleled it in its Quarterly form with the comparison between Macedon and Monmouth; for there is figures in all things.' One point of comparison has escaped this reviewer. Boswell remarked of a casual visitor that he thought him but a weak man.' JOHNSON: Why yes, sir. Here is a man who has passed through life without experience; yet I would rather have him with me than a more sensible man who will not talk readily. This man is always willing to say what he has to say.' 'Yet,' continues Boswell, 'Dr. Johnson had himself by no means that willingness which he praised so much, and I think so justly; for who has not felt the painful effect of the dreary void, when there is a total silence in a company, for any length of time? Johnson once observed to me, "Tom Tyers described me best. 'Sir (said he), you are like a ghost; you never speak till you are spoken to.'"' Johnson, however, was not shy, like Jowett, who attached an exaggerated importance to being able to speak across a dinner table' from the effort that it cost himself. His other 'moral malady,' at which also he is always tilting, was sensitiveness; but, like most shy and sensitive people, he had very little realisation of these qualities in other people. Is it the publica- | tion of Jowett's sermons that has filled all the pulpits with attacks on sensitiveness'? Wherever I go I hear nothing else: it seems

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1 iii. 307, Hill's edition.

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the new sin. Jowett's biographers are generous of his letters, and more are to follow. This is right, for he was a writer far more than a talker-unlike Johnson again—and put his best things into his books and letters. Hence there are not many good things to be gleaned from his table-talk here recorded; the best is that the inscription over the gate of Hell may be 'Ici on parle français. Moreover, he had more care for exact truth than to allow himself to slog like Magee. A criticism of his prose style would be interesting. Mr. Abbott well remarks that he excels in the phrase rather than in the paragraph. I should like to see a dissertation on his use of rhetorical figures-especially meiosis and bathos. To the first I should refer the charge often alleged against him of taking low views of things in his sermons; it was a trick to catch the undergraduate ear, and it succeeded. As an example of the second, I remember a sentence from a letter of congratulation: Marriage not only doubles the joys of life, it quadruples them.' Nobody but Jowett would have dared to write that. He was fond of taking well-known sentences and giving them a twist or an inversion. An authentic example does not at the moment occur to me; but I may illustrate by a parody. is often said, The child is father of the man; shall we not rather say, The man is father of the child?' His lectures were sure to contain good things. He delighted in the exact epithet. I recall a course of lectures on 'Subjects connected with Thucydides (which discussed incidentally the Homeric theory, the relations of the Synoptic Gospels, Herodotus, &c.), in one of which he gave each nation of antiquity an appropriate epithet, but had nothing ready (or so he feigned) for the Egyptians, and looked for several minutes out of the window. Then he gently smacked his lips once or twice, and continued: 'that ambiguous people living on the shores of their ancient river.' I can't say this taught us much political history, but it gave me a lifelong respect for style. Once, being by chance in Oxford when he was giving what proved to be his last lectures as Greek professor, I heard him turn his own reputation to good use. The matter of the lecture, if true, was not new, and the Greek dons who were there for politeness' sake had begun to whisper to each other. Jowett heard this, and laid a trap for them, which he baited with an expected epigram. 'And now we come to Aristarchus, whom perhaps we may call . . . (dead silence) .. the great Aristarchus.' (Peals of laughter, in which Jowett joined as heartily as anyone.)

VOL. III.—NO. 13, N.S.

6

What a pity that Jowett wasted his strength upon translating Thucydides! What's Thucydides to the average citizen, or he to Thucydides? Still he might be much; see below, 22nd.

The volumes contain several portraits. The Watts picture, stiff as a poker, with a head like an acidulated drop, and a most uncharacteristic sneer on its thin lips, is properly ignored. Lady Abercromby's portrait is not unlike him in the face, but the face does not fit the head. I do not remember Jowett in quite such cherubic youth as the Richmond drawing exhibits, but that probably does not much exaggerate his charm. For a true picture of him in later life we must go to the despised art of photography. The Cameron photograph printed in Vol. II. is excellent; it is not only a good likeness, but it gives the ideal man, 'divinely through all hindrance.' This cannot be said of Mr. Onslow Ford's cenotaph exhibited in the Academy. Jowett assisted at the opening of Mr. Ford's Shelley Memorial at University College--as he puts it himself, I was one Sir Topas in this interlude;' and we may continue the quotation, 'Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges;' now he is more personally interested in the question of Pythagoras's opinion concerning wild-fowl. For a fearful wildfowl it is! First of all, why is it so tiny? It looks like a miniature model, but the precious materials prove it to be the thing itself. But why should Jowett be represented the size of a doll? Is it some conspiracy of the Pusey House? And what does the emblem mean on the sarcophagus? What is the significance of a winged cockle-shell? Is it an artistic rendering of Highcockalorum? It is no excuse that the artist has bagged it from the Carlo Marsuppini monument at Santa Croce in Florence, for symbolism was not the strong point of the fifteenth-century artists. I wonder what Jowett would have said? Perhaps only, being a kind man, that it was more appropriate to Shelley than to himself, and had better be sent across to University College with his compliments.

20th.-London has had not a few poets; and even politicians occasionally fall under the spell and in metaphor their feelings seek relief.' Yesterday it was Lord Salisbury. One of our most extraordinary delusions [as young men] was the imagination that the dominant opinion of London in all its parts was much more Radical than Conservative. It was the sort of delusion that a man might feel when looking upon a dry plain, and imagining that it is a waterless country, till he has pierced the surface, and

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