If these had been good fellows, fond of dancing, port and clubs, we should have had no Theory of the Sphere and no Principia. To the culture of the world an Archimedes, a Newton is indispensable so she guards them by a certain aridity. Such are the talents determined on some specialty, which a culminating civilization fosters in the heart of great cities and in royal chambers. But there are metals, like potassium and sodium, which, to be kept pure, must be kept under naphtha. Those constitutions which can bear in open day the rough dealing of the world must be of that mean and average structure such as iron and salt, atmospheric air and water. These conversations led me somewhat later to the knowledge of similar cases, and to the discovery that they are not of very infrequent occurrence. He admired in Newton not so much his theory of the moon as his letter to Collins, in which he forbade him to insert his name with the solution of the problem in the Philosophical Transactions: "It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline." God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth. "Do you think," he said, "I am in such great terror of being shot,-I, who am only waiting to shuffle off my corporeal jacket to slip away into the back stars, and put diameters of the solar system and sidereal orbits between me and all souls,-there to wear out ages in solitude, and forget memory itself, if it be possible?" He had a remorse running to despair of his social gaucheries, and walked miles and miles to get the twitchings out of his face, the starts and shrugs out of his arms and shoulders. His dismay at his visibility had blunted the fears of mortality. He would have given his soul for the ring of Gyges. In all the variety of costumes, a carnival, a kaleidoscope of clothes, to his horror he could never discover a man in the street who All he wished of his tailor was to provide that sober mean of color and cut which would never detain the eye for a moment. Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was not. The most agreeable compliment you could pay him was to imply that you had not observed him in a house or a street where you had met him. Set a hedge here set oaks there,-trees behind trees above all, set evergreens, for they will keep a secret all the year round.
When he bought a house, the first thing he did was to plant trees. The solitary river was not solitary enough the sun and moon put him out. He left the city he hid himself in pastures. For himself he declared that he could not get enough alone to write a letter to a friend.
He coveted Mirabeau's don terrible de la familiarité believing that he whose sympathy goes lowest is the man from whom kings have the most to fear. He envied everyĭrover and lumberman in the tavern their manly speech. His consciousness of the fault made it worse. There was some paralysis on his will, such that when he met men on common terms he spoke weakly and from the point, like a flighty girl. He had good abilities, a genial temper and no vices but he had one defect,-he could not speak in the tone of the people. "Do you not see," he said, "the penalty of learning, and that each of these scholars whom you have met at S-, though he were to be the last man, would, like the executioner in Hood's poem, guillotine the last but one?" He added many lively remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and in the weeks that followed we became better acquainted. In the conversation that followed, my new friend made some extraordinary confessions. I FELL in with a humorist on my travels, who had in his chamber a cast of the Rondanini Medusa, and who assured me that the name which that fine work of art bore in the catalogues was a misnomer, as he was convinced that the sculptor who carved it intended it for Memory, the mother of the Muses.