sociability. His terrifying demeanour, his amazing personal dignity
and majesty, the certainty that he would say whatever came into his
head, whether it was profound and solemn, or testy and
discourteous, gave him a personal ascendancy that never
disappointed a pilgrim.

But he lived all his life in a perpetual melancholy, feeling the
smallest slights acutely, hating at once obscurity and publicity,
aware of his renown, yet shrinking from the evidences of it. He
could be distracted by company, soothed by wine and tobacco; but
left to itself, his mind fell helplessly down the dark slope into a
sadness and a dreariness which deprived life of its savour. It was
not that his dread was a definite one; he was strong and tough
physically, and he regarded death with a solemn curiosity; but he
had a sense of the profitlessness of vacant hours, unthrilled by
beauty and delight, and had also a morbid pride, of the nature of
vanity, which caused him to resent the smallest criticism of his
works from the humblest reader. There are many stories of this, how
he declaimed against the lust of gossip, which he called with rough
appositeness "ripping up a man like a pig," and thanked God with
all his heart and soul that he knew nothing of Shakespeare's
private life; and in the same breath went on to say that he thought
that his own fame was suffering from a sort of congestion, because
he had received no letters about his poems for several days.

In later life he became very pessimistic, and believed that the
world was sinking fast into dull materialism, petty selfishness,
and moral anarchy. He had less opportunity of knowing what was
going on in the world than most people, in his sheltered and
secluded life, with his court of friends and worshippers. And