have been much where I am.  Poor George!  ‘Sufficient unto the day,’ with him, is the theology ‘thereof’!  I picture him to myself going out of a morning, with his new theological dress upon him, and, chancing to meet with some friend, who protests there is some thing or other not quite ‘comme il faut,’ he proceeds with infinite complacency to alter that portion of his attire; the new costume is found equally obnoxious to the criticism of somebody else, and off it goes like the rest.”

This was a ludicrous, but not untrue, representation of George Fellows’s mind; only the “friend” in the image must be supposed to mean his own wayward fancy; for he is not particularly amenable (though very amiable) to external influences.  So dominant, however, is present feeling and impulse, or so deficient is he in comprehensiveness, that he often takes up with the most trumpery arguments; that is, for a few days at a time.  Yet he does not want acuteness.  I have known him shine strongly (as has been said of some one else) upon an angle of a subject; but he never sheds over its whole surface equable illumination.  Where evidence is complicated and various, and consists of many opposing or modifying elements, he never troubles himself to compute the sum total, and strike a fair balance.  He stands aghast in the presence of an objection which he cannot solve, and loses all presence of mind in its contemplation.  He seldom considers whether there are not still greater objections on the other side, nor how much farther, if a principle be just, it ought to carry him.  The mode in which he looks at a subject often reminds me of the way in which the eye, according to metaphysicians, surveys an extensive landscape.  It sees, they say, only a point at a time, punctum visibile, which is perpetually shifting; and the impression of the whole is in fact a rapid combination, by means of memory, of perceptions all but coexistent; if the attention be strongly fixed upon some one object, the rest of the landscape comparatively fades from the view.  Now George Fellowes seemed to me, in a survey of a large subject, to have an incomparable faculty of seeing the minimum visibile, and that so ardently, that all the rest of the landscape vanished at the moment from his perceptions.

“Well,” said I, smiling, “you must not blame him for his not reaching at once and per saltum your position.  He has been more deliberate in stripping himself.  Yet he has come on pretty well.  You ought not to despair of him.  I wonder at what point he is now.”

“You may ask him to-morrow,” said he, “for I am expecting him here to spend a few weeks with me.  At whatever point he may be in these days of ‘progress,’ as they are called, he does not know that I am already arrived at the ne plus ultra; for my letters to him were yet briefer and rarer than to you:  and I never touched on these topics.  Where would have been the use of asking counsel of such an oracle?”

I said I should be glad to see him.  “But I shall be still better pleased to hear from you, why you are dissatisfied with any such system as his; and especially why you say he ought in consistency to go much farther.”