Nietzsche was by temperament a philosopher after the manner of the Greeks. In other words, philosophy was not to him, as to the average modern philosopher, a matter of books and the study, but a life to be lived. It seemed to him to have much less concern with “truth” than with the essentials of fine living. He loved travel and movement, he loved scenery, he loved cities and the spectacle of men; above all, he loved solitude. The solitude of cities drew him strongly; he envied Heraclitus his desert study amid the porticoes and peristyles of the immense temple of Diana. He had, however, his own favourite place of work, to which he often alludes, the Piazza di San Marco at Venice, amid the doves, in front of the strange and beautiful structure which he “loved, feared, and envied;” and here in the spring, between ten o’clock and midday, he found his best philosophic laboratory. It was in Italy that Nietzsche seems to have found himself most at home, although there are no signs that he felt any special sympathy with the Italians, that is to say in later than Renaissance days. For the most part he possessed very decided sympathies and antipathies. His antipathy to his own Germans lay in the nature of things. Every prophet’s message is primarily directed to his own people. And Nietzsche was unsparing in his keen criticism of the Germans. He tells somewhere with a certain humour how people abroad would ask him if Germany had produced of late no great thinker or artist, no really good book, and how with the courage of despair he would at last reply, “Yes, Bismarck!” Nietzsche was willing enough to recognise the kind of virtue personified in Bismarck. But with that recognition nearly all was said in favour of Germany that Nietzsche had to say. There is little in the German spirit that answered to his demands. He admired clearness, analytic precision, and highly organised intelligence, light and alert. He saw no sufficient reason why profundity should lack a fine superficies, nor why strength should be ungainly. His instinctive comparison for a good thinker was always a good dancer. As a child he had been struck by seeing a rope-dancer, and throughout life dancing seemed to him the image of the finest culture, supple to bend, strong to retain its own equilibrium, an exercise demanding the highest training and energy of all the muscles of a well-knit organism. But the indubitable intellectual virtues of the bulky and plodding German are scarcely those which can well be symbolised by an Otero or a Caicedo. “There is too much beer in the German intellect,” Nietzsche said. For the last ten centuries Germany has wilfully stultified herself; “nowhere else has there been so vicious a misuse of the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity,” to which he was inclined to add music. (“The theatre and music,” he remarked in _Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft_, “are the haschisch and betel of