It is sometimes said that Nietzsche’s mastery of his thought and style was increasing up to the last. This I can scarcely admit, even as regards style. No doubt there is at the best a light and swift vigour of movement in these last writings which before he had never attained. He can pour out now a shimmering stream of golden phrases with which he has intoxicated himself, and tries to intoxicate us. We may lend ourselves to the charm, but it has no enduring hold. This master of gay or bitter invective no longer possesses the keenly reasoned and piercing insight of the earlier Nietzsche. We feel that he has become the victim of obsessions which drive him like a leaf before the wind, and all his exuberant wit is unsubstantial and pathetic as that of Falstaff. The devouring flame has at length eaten the core out of the man and his style, leaving only this coruscating shell. And at a touch even this thin shell collapsed into smouldering embers. From a child Nietzsche was subject to strangely prophetic dreams. In a dream which, when a boy, he put into literary form, he tells how he seemed to be travelling forward amid a glorious landscape, while carolling larks ascended to the clouds, and his whole life seemed to stretch before him in a vista of happy years; “and suddenly a shrill cry reached our ears; it came from the neighbouring lunatic asylum.” Even in 1876 his friends began to see that Nietzsche attached extraordinary importance to his own work. After he wrote _Zarathustra_, this self-exaltation increased, and began to find expression in his work. Latterly, it is said, he came to regard himself as the incarnation of the genius of humanity. It has always been found a terrible matter to war with the moral system of one’s age; it will have its revenge, one way or another, from within or from without, whatever happens after. Nietzsche strove for nothing less than to remodel the moral world after his own heart’s desire, and his brain was perishing of exhaustion in the immense effort. In 1889--at the moment when his work at last began to attract attention--he became hopelessly insane. A period of severe hallucinatory delirium led on to complete dementia, and he passes beyond our sight. II.