here "so good a relick of the old times" was not
likely to be wanting. It was a house, at any rate, for the "modest man" to
whom, as to the poet Cowper, public appearances were so many penances; for
though the world may not agree with Earle as to the degree in which this
quality sets off a man, there is no question of Lord Falkland's welcome of
the modest man, even if that grave divine "Mr. Earles," did not point out
this diffident guest as one who "had a piece of singularity," and, for all
his modesty, "scorned something."

And, as "the most polite and _accurate_ men of the University of
Oxford"[O] were to be met with at Tew, we may further hope that Earle
there watched the social mellowing of the "downright scholar whose mind
was too much taken up with his mind,"[P] and strove to carry out his own
recommendation, "practising him in men, and brushing him over with good
company."

Symposium is a word that has been much abused and vulgarised of late, but
something like its true Platonic sense must have been realised by the
company at Lord Falkland's, as they "examined and refined those grosser
propositions which laziness and consent made current in vulgar
conversation":[Q] for a more Platonic programme it would be difficult to
conceive. The pattern of the ideal republic is, we know, laid up somewhere
in the heavens; but the republic of letters so far as it was represented,
must have been as near the ideal in that house as it ever was on earth.
And in this ideal one of Earle's characters already mentioned was not only
a natural but a necessary element. "The contemplative man" is solitary, we
are told, in company, but he would not be so in this company. "Outward
show, the stream, the people," were not taken seriously at Lord
Falkland's; and the man who "can spell heaven out of earth" would be the
centre of a rare group--men upon whose fresh and eager appetites
conversation that was "mysterious and inward" could not easily pall.

Bishop Berkeley is one of the very few men who could answer with any
plausibility to this last character of Earle's. But the marvellous
amenity of his social gifts brings him a little closer to the kindly race
of men than Earle thinks is usual with the contemplative student. In every
other point it is an accurate piece of portraiture.[R] Nature might well
ask approbation of her works and variety from a man who was ever feeding
his noble curiosity and never satisfying it. He, too, made a "ladder of