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loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two
qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes
him a bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my
gratitude to Herbert Spencer.
Goethe's Life, by Lewes, had a great importance for me when it
first fell into my hands--a strange instance of the partiality of
man's good and man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire than
Goethe; he seems a very epitome of the sins of genius, breaking
open the doors of private life, and wantonly wounding friends, in
that crowning offence of Werther, and in his own character a mere
pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties of
superior talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious of the
rights and duties of his office. And yet in his fine devotion to
his art, in his honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller,
what lessons are contained! Biography, usually so false to its
office, does here for once perform for us some of the work of
fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue of
man's nature, and how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit and
persevere in the same character. History serves us well to this
effect, but in the originals, not in the pages of the popular
epitomiser, who is bound, by the very nature of his task, to make
us feel the difference of epochs instead of the essential identity
of man, and even in the originals only to those who can recognise
their own human virtues and defects in strange forms, often
inverted and under strange names, often interchanged. Martial is a
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