IV

"What an admirable temper!" is the exclamation which expresses our first
feeling on reading the foregoing sentences. It renews the spirit of a
man merely to peruse such things. Scales fall from our eyes, and we see
what we most essentially are, with pleasure, as good children gleefully
recognise their goodness: and at the same time we are filled with
contrition that we should have ever forgotten it. And this that we most
essentially are rational beings, lovers of goodness, children of
hope,--how directly Duerer appeals to it: "Nature has implanted in us the
desire of knowing all things." It reminds one of Ben Jonson's:--

It is a false quarrel against nature, that she helps understanding but
in a few, when the most part of mankind are inclined by her thither, if
they would take the pains; no less than birds to fly, horses to run,
&c., which, if they lose it, is through their own sluggishness, and by
that means they become her prodigies, not her children.

There is something refreshing and inspiriting in the mere conviction of
our teachableness; and when the same author, referring to Plato's
travels in search of knowledge, says, "He laboured, so must we," we do
not find the comparison humiliating either to Plato or ourselves. For
"without a way there is no going," and every man of superior mould says
to us with more or less of benignity, "I am the way: follow me." Such
means or ways of attainment have been followed by all whose success is
known to us, and are followed now by all "finely touched and gifted
men." I might quote in illustration of these assertions the whole of
Reynolds' Sixth Discourse, so marvellous for its acute and delicate
discrimination; but I will content myself with a few leading passages: