whole, but to chew the cud of disinterested meditation, and accept or reject, praise or blame, in accordance with our natural and deliberate taste.  He taught us to love Beauty supremely, to ensue it, to be on the look out for it; and, when we found it—­when we found what really and without convention satisfied our “sense for beauty”—­to adore it, and, as far as we could, to imitate it.  Contrariwise, he taught us to shun and eschew what was hideous, to make war upon it, and to be on our guard against its contaminating influence.  And this teaching he applied alike to hideousness in character, sight, and sound—­to “watchful jealousy” and rancour and uncleanness; to the “dismal Mapperly Hills,” and the “uncomeliness of Margate,” the “squalid streets of Bethnal Green,” and “Coles’ Truss Manufactory standing where it ought not, on the finest site in Europe”; to such poetry as—­

    And scarcely had she begun to wash
    When she was aware of the grisly gash,

to such hymns as—­

    O happy place! 
    When shall I be
    My God with Thee,
    To see Thy face?

“What a touch of grossness!” he exclaimed, “what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names—­Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg!  In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than “the best race in the world”; by the Ilissus there was “no Wragg,[8] poor thing!”

Then he taught us to aim at sincerity in our intercourse with Nature.  Never to describe her as others saw her, never to pretend a knowledge of her which we did not possess, never to endow her with fanciful attributes of our own or other people’s imagining, never to assume her sympathy with mortal lots, never to forget that she, like humanity, has her dark, her awful, her revengeful moods.  He taught us not to be ashamed of our own sense of fun, our own faculty of laughter; but to let them play freely even round the objects of our reasoned reverence, just in the spirit of the teacher who said that no man really believed in his religion till he could venture to joke about it.  Above all, he taught us, even when our feelings were most forcibly aroused, to be serene, courteous, and humane; never to scold, or storm, or bully; and to avoid like a pestilence such brutality as that of the Saturday Review when it said that something or another was “eminently worthy of a great nation,” and to disparage it “eminently worthy of a great fool.”  He laid it down as a “precious truth” that one’s effectiveness depends upon “the power of persuasion, of charm; that without this all fury, energy, reasoning power, acquirement, are thrown away and only render their owner more miserable.”

In a word, he combined Light with Sweetness, and in the combination lies his abiding power.

[Footnote 4:  “Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.”—­Pope.]

[Footnote 5:  He was so described by George Sand.]