ning at the table d'hote of the nearest inn, with supper at
a "Gast-Haus"--so passed his days. He had no intimate friends, and his
chief dissipation was playing the flute. His black poodle, named "Homo"
in a subtle mood of irony, accompanied him everywhere, and on this dog
he lavished what he was pleased to call his love. He anticipated Rip Van
Winkle concerning dogs and women, and when Homo died, he bought another
dog that looked exactly like the first, and was just as good.

In a few instances Schopenhauer read his essays in public as lectures,
but his ideas were keyed to concert pitch and were too pronounced for
average audiences. He was offered a professorship at Gottingen and also
at Heidelberg, if he would "tone things down," but he scornfully
declined the proposition, and said, "The Universities must grow to my
level before I can talk to them." By his caustic criticisms of
contemporaries he became both feared and shunned, and no doubt he found
a certain satisfaction in the fact that the so-called learned men of his
time would neither listen to his lectures, read his books, nor abide his
presence. He had made himself felt in any event. "Blessed are ye when
men shall revile you," is the sweet consolation of all persecuted
persons--and persecution is only the natural resentment towards those
who have too much ego in their cosmos.

His opinions concerning love and marriage need not be taken too
seriously. Ideas are the results of temperaments and moods. When a man
amplifies on the woman question he describes the women he knows best,
and more especially the particular She who is in his head. Literature is
only autobiography, more or less discreetly veiled. Schopenhauer hated
his mother to the day of her death, and although during the last
twenty-four years of her life he never once saw her, her image could at
any time be quickly and vividly thrown upon the screen. The women a
strong man has known are never forgotten--here is where time does not
tarnish, nor the days grow dim.

Between his twenty-eighth and fortieth years, Schopenhauer had wandered
through Italy--spent months at Venice, and dawdled away the days at Rome
and Florence. He had dipped deep into life--and the wrong kind of life.
And his experiences had confirmed his suspicions--it was all bitter--he
was not disappointed.

Until Schopenhauer was past thirty he was known as the son of Johanna
Schopenhauer. And when he once told her that posterity would nev