unalterable, but
with me that useless exercise has turned chiefly on the conception of a
different self, and not, as it usually does in literature, on the
advantage of having been born in a different age, and more especially in
one where life is imagined to have been altogether majestic and
graceful. With my present abilities, external proportions, and generally
small provision for ecstatic enjoyment, where is the ground for
confidence that I should have had a preferable career in such an epoch
of society? An age in which every department has its awkward-squad seems
in my mind's eye to suit me better. I might have wandered by the Strymon
under Philip and Alexander without throwing any new light on method or
organising the sum of human knowledge; on the other hand, I might have
objected to Aristotle as too much of a systematiser, and have preferred
the freedom of a little self-contradiction as offering more chances of
truth. I gather, too, from the undeniable testimony of his disciple
Theophrastus that there were bores, ill-bred persons, and detractors
even in Athens, of species remarkably corresponding to the English, and
not yet made endurable by being classic; and altogether, with my present
fastidious nostril, I feel that I am the better off for possessing
Athenian life solely as an inodorous fragment of antiquity. As to
Sappho's Mitylene, while I am convinced that the Lesbian capital held
some plain men of middle stature and slow conversational powers, the
addition of myself to their number, though clad in the majestic folds of
the himation and without cravat, would hardly have made a sensation
among the accomplished fair ones who were so precise in adjusting their
own drapery about their delicate ankles. Whereas by being another sort
of person in the present age I might have given it some needful
theoretic clue; or I might have poured forth poetic strains which would
have anticipated theory and seemed a voice from "the prophetic soul of
the wide world dreaming of things to come;" or I might have been one of
those benignant lovely souls who, without astonishing the public and
posterity, make a happy difference in the lives close around them, and
in this way lift the average of earthly joy: in some form or other I
might have been so filled from the store of universal existence that I
should have been freed from that empty wishing which is like a child's
cry to be inside a golden cloud, its imagination being too ignora