tage of studying Nature is that we are not tempted to criticise her. We go to the Academy, and for a whole morning contrast faults with merits. If the time so spent had been passed in the fields with the clouds we should have gone home less conceited. It is an awful thought that behind human speech, incapable by its very nature of anything but approximate expression, and distorted by weakness and wilfulness, lies the TRUTH as it is, exact without qualification. The long apprenticeship has ended in little or nothing. What I was fifty years ago I am now; certainly no better, with no greater self-control, with no greater magnanimity. How much I might have gained had I taken life as an art I cannot say. I have been looking at a cabinet of flies. Hundreds of them, each different, were arranged in order and named. Some I had to examine through a microscope. Their beauty was marvellous, but more marvellous was their variety. The differences, although the type was preserved, seemed inexhaustible, and all reasons for them broke down. Johnson is religious through and through, but there are passages in the Rambler and Idler dark as starless, moonless midnight. ‘None would have recourse to an invisible power, but that all other subjects have eluded their hopes. . . . That misery does not make all virtuous, experience too certainly informs us; but it is no less certain that of what virtue there is, misery produces far the greatest part.’ There is seldom in life any occasion for great virtues, and we must not be disappointed if it passes without great passion. We must expect to be related to one another by nothing more than ordinary bonds and satisfied if human beings give us pleasure without excitement. I have good reason to believe that I am passing on life’s journey through what almost all wayfarers therein have had to pass through, but nobody has told me of it. How wonderful is the withdrawal of heat! It silently departs, the iron grows cold, but the heat spreads and lives! ‘Who knows, though he sees the snow-cold blossom With increase of reading we have fallen into a fireside, dilettante culture of ideas as an intellectual pleasure. Amos and Isaiah do not deal in ideas. Their strength lies in love and hatred, in the keenness and depth of their division between right and wrong. They repeat the work of God the Creator: chaotic sameness becomes diverse; the heavenly firmament mounts on high; there is Light and there is Darkness. SHAKESPEARE ‘Glory to thee in the highest, thou confidant of our Creator !’ (Landor, Imaginary Conversations, Delille and Lander). 2 Henry V]. iii. 3.—The lines beginning with the one which follows are not in the old play and are Shakespeare’s own: ‘ O thou eternal Mover of the heavens,’ etc. Johnson’s note is: ‘This is one of the scenes which have been applauded by the criticks, and which will continue to be admired when prejudices shall cease, and bigotry give way to impartial examination. These are beauties that rise out of nature and of truth; the superficial reader cannot miss them, the profound can image nothing beyond them.’ We talk idly of Johnson’s pompous redundance. His sentences are balanced, and it is therefore supposed that the second part repeats the first, but the truth is that each part contains a new |