those whom, though long since dead, he held in far higher esteem than
all the elderly ladies and curates and MacTavishes who ever lived. His
appetite in literature was keen, but fastidious. He devoured all the
books he could procure about the Renaissance of art in Italy. The
works of Mr Walter Pater were as a treasure-house of suggestion to
him, and did much to form and guide his gradually developing
mentality. He read Plato, being even more fascinated by the exquisite
technique of the dialectic than by the ethical value of the teaching.
And there was one small, slim book that he always carried about with
him, and kept for special reading in the fields and woods. This was
Virgil's Eclogues, the sylvan atmosphere of which penetrated the very
depths of his being, and created in him a moral or spiritual
atmosphere which was its counterpart. He seemed to live amid gracious
pastoral scenes, where beautiful youths and maidens passed a
perpetual springtime in a land of dewy lawns, and shady groves, and
pools, and rippling streams. Daphnis and Mopsus, Corydon, Alexis, and
Amyntas, were all to him real personages, who peopled his solitude,
inspired his poetic fancy, and fostered in his imagination the
elements of an ideal life where the beauty and purity and freshness of
untainted Nature reigned supreme. The accident of his lameness, by
incapacitating him for violent exercise out of doors, ministered to
the development of this spiritual tendency, and threw him back upon
the allurements of a refined idealism. Daphnis became to him the
embodiment, the concrete image, of eternal youthhood, of adolescence
in the abstract, the attribute of an idealised humanity. To lead the
pure Daphnis life of simplicity, stainlessness, communion with
beautiful souls, was to lead the highest life. To find one's bliss in
sunshine, flowers, and the winds of heaven--in both the physical and
moral spheres--was to find the highest bliss. Why should not he,
Austin Trevor, cripple as he was, so live the Daphnis life as to be