and nearest obligations to remedy an injustice which lay higher, or further, or deeper, and which allured him more by the perhaps greater exertion of the struggle. He was chivalrous and gallant, but often like that other Don Quixote he wasted his valour on a windmill. He burned with insatiable ambition, which made him look on all the ordinary distinctions of social life as vanities, and yet he considered his greatest happiness to consist in a calm, domestic, secluded life. He was a poet in the highest sense of the word; at the sight of a spark he dreamed of solar systems; peopled them with creatures of his own creation, felt himself to be lord of a world, which he had animated, and yet could immediately thereupon have a conversation on the price of rice, the rules of grammar, or the economic advantages of the Egyptian system of artificial incubation. No science was entirely unknown to him: he “guessed intuitively” what he did not know, and possessed in a very high degree the gift of using the little he knew (every one knows a little, and he, though knowing more than some others, was no exception to this rule) in a way that multiplied the measure of his knowledge. He was punctual and orderly, besides being exceedingly patient; but precisely because punctuality, order, and patience were difficult to him,—his mind being somewhat wild,—slow and circumspect in judging of affairs; though this seemed not to be the case with those who heard him reach his conclusions so quickly. His
