that the pursuit of innocent pleasure is a thing to which it is justifiable to devote some energy, and yet this does not make him tolerant.  The truth is that he was so supremely egotistical, so entirely wrapped up in himself and his own life, that what other people did and cared for was a matter of entire indifference to him.  His social tastes, and they were considerable, were all devoted to one and the same purpose.  He liked staying at agreeable country houses, because it was a pleasant distraction to him and improved his health.  He liked dining out, because it stimulated his digestion.  All human relationships are made subservient to the same end.  It never seems to him to be a duty to minister to the pleasure of others.  He takes what he can get at the banquet of life, and, having secured his share, goes away to digest it.  When, at the end of his life, social entertainments tried his nerves, he gave them up.  When people came to see him, and he found himself getting tired or excited by conversation, if it was not convenient to him to leave the room, he put stoppers in his ears to blur the sense of the talk.  What better parable of the elaborate framework of egotism on which his life was constructed could there be than the following legend, not derived from the book?  One evening, the story goes, the philosopher had invited, at his club, a youthful stranger to join him in a game of billiards.  The young man, who was a proficient, ran out in two breaks, leaving his rival a hopeless distance behind.  When he had finished, Spencer, with a severe air, said to him:  “To play billiards in an ordinary manner is an agreeable adjunct to life; to play as you have been playing is evidence of a misspent youth.”  A man who was not an egotist and a philosopher, however much he disliked the outcome of the game, would have attempted some phrases of commendation.  But Spencer’s view was, that anything which rendered a player of billiards less useful to himself, by giving him fewer opportunities in the course of a game for what he would have called healthful and pleasurable recreation, was not only not to be tolerated, but was to be morally reprobated.

As to his health, a subject which occupies the larger part of the volumes, it is evident that, though his nervous system was deranged, he was a complete hypochondriac.  There is very little repining about the invalid conditions under which he lived; and it gradually dawned upon me that this was not because he had resolved to bear it in a stoical and courageous manner, but because his ill-health, seen through the rosy spectacles of the egotist, was a matter of pleasurable excitement to him; he complains a good deal of the peculiar sensations he experienced, and his broken nights, but with a solemn satisfaction in the whole experience.  He never had to bear physical pain, and the worst evil from which he suffered was the boredom resulting from the way in which he had to try, or conceived that he had to try, to kill time without reading or working.