ainment and pastime, but I have no ambition nor design
upon the style.' Until he accepts religion, with all its limitations and
encouragements, he has not even sure landmarks on his way. So
speculative a brain, able to prove, and proving for its own uneasy
satisfaction, that even suicide is 'not so naturally sin, that it may
never be otherwise,' could allow itself to be guided by no fixed rules;
and to a brain so abstract, conduct must always have seemed of less
importance than it does to most other people, and especially conduct
which is argument, like the demonstrations on behalf of what seems, on
the face of it, a somewhat iniquitous divorce and re-marriage, or like
those unmeasured eulogies, both of this 'blest pair of swans,' and of
the dead child of a rich father. He admits, in one of his letters, that
in his elegies, 'I did best when I had least truth for my subjects'; and
of the _Anniversaries_ in honour of little Mistress Drury, 'But for the
other part of the imputation of having said so much, my defence is, that
my purpose was to say as well as I could; for since I never saw the
gentlewoman, I cannot be understood to have bound myself to have spoken
the just truth.' He is always the casuist, always mentally impartial in
the face of a moral problem, reserving judgment on matters which, after
all, seem to him remote from an unimpassioned contemplation of things;
until that moment of crisis comes, long after he has become a clergyman,
when the death of his wife changed the world for him, and he became, in
the words of Walton, 'crucified to the world, and all those vanities,
those imaginary pleasures, that are daily acted on that restless stage;
and they were as perfectly crucified to him.' From that time to the end
of his life he had found what he had all the while been seeking: rest
for the restlessness of his mind, in a meditation upon the divine
nature; occupation, in being 'ambassador of God,' through the pulpit;
himself, as it seemed to him, at his fullest and noblest. It was
himself, really, that he had been seeking all the time, conscious at
least of that in all the deviations of the way; himself, the ultimate of
his curiosities.

II

And yet, what remains to us out of this life of many purposes, which had
found an end satisfying to itself in the Deanery of St. Paul's, is
simply a bundle of manuscript verses, which the writer could bring
himself neither to print nor to destroy. His first satire speaks