re's engraver has disfigured into the
nearly or the utterly irrecognizable. Two Pencil-sketches, which no
artist could approve of, hasty sketches done in some social hour, one
by his friend Spedding, one by Banim the Novelist, whom he slightly
knew and had been kind to, tell a much truer story so far as they go:
of these his Brother has engravings; but these also I must suppress as
inadequate for strangers.

Nor in the way of Spiritual Portraiture does there, after so much
writing and excerpting, anything of importance remain for me to say.
John Sterling and his Life in this world were--such as has been already
said. In purity of character, in the so-called moralities, in all manner
of proprieties of conduct, so as tea-tables and other human tribunals
rule them, he might be defined as perfect, according to the world's
pattern: in these outward tangible respects the world's criticism of him
must have been praise and that only. An honorable man, and good citizen;
discharging, with unblamable correctness, all functions and duties
laid on him by the customs (_mores_) of the society he lived in,--with
correctness and something more. In all these particulars, a man
perfectly _moral_, or of approved virtue according to the rules.

Nay in the far more essential tacit virtues, which are not marked on
stone tables, or so apt to be insisted on by human creatures over tea
or elsewhere,--in clear and perfect fidelity to Truth wherever found,
in childlike and soldier-like, pious and valiant loyalty to the Highest,
and what of good and evil that might send him,--he excelled among good
men. The joys and the sorrows of his lot he took with true simplicity
and acquiescence. Like a true son, not like a miserable mutinous rebel,
he comported himself in this Universe. Extremity of distress--and surely
his fervid temper had enough of contradiction in this world--could not
tempt him into impatience at any time. By no chance did you ever hear
from him a whisper of those mean repinings, miserable arraignings and
questionings of the Eternal Power, such as weak souls even well disposed
will sometimes give way to in the pressure of their despair; to the like
of this he never yielded, or showed the least tendency to yield;--which
surely was well on his part. For the Eternal Power, I still remark,
will not answer the like of this, but silently and terribly accounts it
impious, blasphemous and damnable, and now as heretofore will visit it
as such.