This was his rarest quality. Far on in middle age, when men begin
to lie down with the bestial goddesses, Comfort and Respectability,
the strings of his nature still sounded as high a note as a young
man's. He loved the harsh voice of duty like a call to battle. He
loved courage, enterprise, brave natures, a brave word, an ugly
virtue; everything that lifts us above the table where we eat or
the bed we sleep upon. This with no touch of the motive-monger or
the ascetic. He loved his virtues to be practical, his heroes to
be great eaters of beef; he loved the jovial Heracles, loved the
astute Odysseus; not the Robespierres and Wesleys. A fine buoyant
sense of life and of man's unequal character ran through all his
thoughts. He could not tolerate the spirit of the pick-thank;
being what we are, he wished us to see others with a generous eye
of admiration, not with the smallness of the seeker after faults.
If there shone anywhere a virtue, no matter how incongruously set,
it was upon the virtue we must fix our eyes. I remember having
found much entertainment in Voltaire's SAUL, and telling him what
seemed to me the drollest touches.
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