height, looking shortish because, though he was not particularly
stout, there was nothing slender about him. His ugliness was not
unamiable; it was accidental, external, excrescential. Attached to
his face from the left ear to the point of his chin was a monstrous
goitre, which hung down to his collar bone, and was very inadequately
balanced by a smaller one on his right eyelid. Nature's malice was so
overdone in his case that it somehow failed to produce the effect of
repulsion it seemed to have aimed at. When you first met Thomas Tyler
you could think of nothing else but whether surgery could really do
nothing for him. But after a very brief acquaintance you never
thought of his disfigurements at all, and talked to him as you might
to Romeo or Lovelace; only, so many people, especially women, would
not risk the preliminary ordeal, that he remained a man apart and a
bachelor all his days. I am not to be frightened or prejudiced by a
tumor; and I struck up a cordial acquaintance with him, in the course
of which he kept me pretty closely on the track of his work at the
Museum, in which I was then, like himself, a daily reader.

He was by profession a man of letters of an uncommercial kind. He was
a specialist in pessimism; had made a translation of Ecclesiastes of
which eight copies a year were sold; and followed up the pessimism of
Shakespear and Swift with keen interest. He delighted in a hideous
conception which he called the theory of the cycles, according to
which the history of mankind and the universe keeps eternally
repeating itself without the slightest variation throughout all
eternity; so that he had lived and died and had his goitre before and
would live and die and have it again and again and again. He liked to
believe that nothing that happened to him was completely novel: he
was persuaded that he often had some recollection of its previous
occurrence in the last cycle. He hunted out allusions to this