s mumbling it as nature's final page,'

"And cramp the young with their rules of 'wisdom,' lest, as he says
scornfully:--

"'Lest dreaded change, long dammed by dull decay,
Should bring the world a vessel steered by brain,
And ancients musical at close of day.'

"'Earth loves her young,' begins his next sonnet:--

"'Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads
The ways they walk; by what they speak oppressed.'

"But his conviction, if here for a moment it discharges gall, is usually
cheerful with the cheerfulness of health. Sometimes he consciously
expounds it; oftener he leaves you to seek and find it, but always (I
believe) you will find this happy hope in youth at the base of everything
he writes.

"The next thing to be noted is that he does not hope in youth because it
is a period of license and waywardness, but because it is a period of
imagination--

"'Days, when the ball of our vision
Had eagles that flew unabashed to sun,'

"And because it therefore has a better chance of grasping what is Universal
than has the prudential wisdom of age which contracts its eye to
particulars and keeps it alert for social pitfalls--the kind of wisdom
seen at its best (but its best never made a hero) in Bubb Doddington's
verses:--

"'Love thy country, wish it well,
_Not with too intense a care_;
'Tis enough that, when it fell,
Thou its ruin didst not share.'

"Admirable caution! Now contrast it for a moment with, let us say, the
silly quixotic figure of Horatius with the broken bridge behind him:--

"'Round turned he, as not deigning
Those craven ranks to see:
Nought spake he to Lars Porsena,
To Sextus nought spake he;
But he saw on Palatinus
The white porch of his home--'

"I protest I have no heart to go on with the quotation: so unpopular is
its author, just now, and so certainly its boyish heroism calls back the
boyish tears to my eyes. Well, this boyish vision is what Mr. Meredith
chooses to trust rather than Bubb Doddington's, and he trusts it as being
the likelier to apprehend universal truths: he believes that Horatius with
an army in front and a broken bridge behind him was a nobler figure than
Bubb Doddington wishing his country well but not with too intense a care;
and not only nobler but--this is the point--more obedient to divine law,
more expressive of that which man was meant to be. If Mr. Meredith trus