“And the king looked, and saw nothing except the crabbed printed lines.

“So he said, ’Not your text-book, sir, but the book from which your arguments are rehearsed.’

“‘Sire,’ said the preacher, ‘look but once more upon the book.’  And he showed him that four of the words upon the page had a thin line drawn in ink below them.  ‘That was the writing of my discourse,’ he said.”

Neither, it must be remembered, was Arthur a first-rate conversationalist.  He did not steer a conversation; he could keep the ball going creditably when it was once started; but he never communicated to the circle in which he was that indefinable interest which is so intangible and yet so unmistakable.

The two points that I spoke of that he is always trying to work out in his books are: 

(1) the strength of temperament, and the difficulty, almost impossibility, of altering it.  “The most we can do is to register change,” are the first words of his novel.  In this book, the situation of which is not a very unusual one, the hero falls in love with one of two sisters, of rare personal beauty and attractiveness, but no particular intellect.  He soon wearies of her, being of that fantastic, weak, discontented spirit which Arthur invariably portrayed in his heroes—­drawing it I can not conceive whence—­and then falls in love with the other, as he ought to have done all along, being, as she is, fully his match in intellect, and far above him in heart and strength of character.  The wife at the crisis of this other love, is killed in a street accident, and remorse ensues.  But the book is a weary one; it bears upon its face the burden of sorrow.  “How could this have been otherwise?” is the keynote of the story.

Along with this, and indeed as a development of this central principle, is the tendency to treat and write of “sin” so called, wrong-doing, failure of ideal, as variations of spiritual health, as diseases, the ravages of which it is possible for the skilful hand to palliate, but not to cure; to think of and treat sin as a hideous contagion, which has power for a season, perhaps inherently, to drag souls within its grasp, involve and overwhelm them; and consequently to regard the sinner with the deepest sympathy and pity, but with hardly any anger:  in fact, I have known him very seriously offend the company he has been in, I have even heard him stigmatized as of loose principles, from his readiness, even anxiety, to condone a sensual offence in a man of high intellect and brilliant gifts.

“He went wrong,” he said very sternly, “through having too much passion; and that we can judge him, proves that we have not enough.  Well, we shall both of us have to become different:  he to be brought down to the harmonious mean, we to be screwed up to it.  It is easy to see which will be the most painful process:  as soon as he gets an idea of whither he is being led, how thankful he will be for every pang that teaches him restraint, and purifies; while we—­we shall suffer blind wrench after wrench, stung into feeling at any cost, and not till we painfully overtop the barrier shall we guess whither we are going.”