if haply he might have selected them. Things ignoble never approached
near enough for his refusal; they had not with him so much as that
negative connexion. If I had to equip an author I should ask no better
than to arm him and invest him with precisely the riches that were
renounced by the man whose intellect, by integrity, had become a presence-
chamber.

It was by holding session among so many implicit safeguards that he
taught, rather than by precepts. Few were these in his speech, but his
personality made laws for me. It was a subtle education, for it
persuaded insensibly to a conception of my own. How, if he would not
define, could I know what things were and what were not worthy of his
gentle and implacable judgment? I must needs judge them for myself, yet
he constrained me in the judging. Within that constraint and under that
stimulus, which seemed to touch the ultimate springs of thoughts before
they sprang, I began to discern all things in literature and in life--in
the chastity of letters and in the honour of life--that I was bound to
love. Not the things of one character only, but excellent things of
every character. There was no tyranny in such a method. His idleness
justified itself by the liberality it permitted to his taste. Never
having made his love of letters further a secondary purpose, never having
bound the literary genius--that delicate Ariel--to any kind of servitude,
never having so much as permitted himself a prejudice whereby some of his
delights should be stinted while others were indulged beyond the
sanctions of modest reason, he barely tolerated his own preferences,
which lay somewhat on the hither side of full effectiveness of style.
These the range of his reading confessed by certain exclusions.
Nevertheless it was not of deficiencies that he was patient: he did but
respect the power of pause, and he disliked violence chiefly because
violence is apt to confess its own limits. Perhaps, indeed, his own fine