was
perhaps yet to come. Had Dryden died at his age, we should have had none
of the great satires; had Scott died at his age, we should have had no
Waverley Novels. Dying at the height of his power, and in the full tide
of thought and activity, he seems almost to have fulfilled the aspiration
and unconscious prophecy of one of the early essays:

'Does not life go down with a better grace foaming in full body over a
precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?

'When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love
die young, I cannot help believing that they had this sort of death
also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man,
this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much as
an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the
highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The
noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are
hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this
happy starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.'

But we on this side are the poorer--by how much we can never know. What
strengthens the conviction that he might yet have surpassed himself and
dwarfed his own best work is, certainly no immaturity, for the flavour of
wisdom and old experience hangs about his earliest writings, but a vague
sense awakened by that brilliant series of books, so diverse in theme, so
slight often in structure and occasions so gaily executed, that here was
a finished literary craftsman, who had served his period of
apprenticeship and was playing with his tools. The pleasure of wielding
the graven tool, the itch of craftsmanship, was strong upon him, and many
of the works he has left are the overflow of a laughing energy,
arabesques carved on the rock in the artist's painless hours.

All art, it is true, is play of a sort; the 'sport-impulse' (to translate
a German phrase) is deep at the root of the artist's power; Sophocles,
Shakespeare, Moliere, and Goethe, in a very profound sense, make game of
life. But to make game of life was to each of these the very loftiest
and most imperative employ to be found for him on this planet; to hold
the mirror up to Nature so that for the first time she may see herself;
to 'be a candle-holder and look on' at the pageantry which, but for the
candle-holder, would huddle along in the