Though not so plentiful as our peaches in a good year, there are men of such noble quality that being in their company enriches and mellows one. The wisdom they by contact give out is not celibate and sterile like Solomon’s, but wedded to enjoyment, and hence productive. They would seem to be a confirmation of the otherwise disputable maxim of Spinoza, that every advance in joy implies an ascent in the scale of intelligence and capability. The influence of such a man insensibly disposes one to gentle charities, brave conceptions, heroic virtues. They have a suggestion of the potentialities in the unvitiated Adam, a creature, according to hallowed authority, originally created but a little lower than the angels. Almost invariably these men have physical beauty; and the moral charm is in keeping with that, apparently a spontaneous emanation from it. It is as golden wine down in a golden chalice, where, seen through the lustre suffusing the shadow, the delicious fluid looks to be the exuded gathered sap of the precious metal. It was of the Marquis de Grandvin that the landscape painter, B. Hobbema Brown, an inoffensive sort of theoretical misanthrope, with a treacherous flow of loving-kindness in him--to borrow one of his own eccentric phrases; the same B. Hobbema who, were his significant reticence on the point, no unwise thing in him, by the way, conjecturally rendered into words, would seem in his own private judgment to have been treated illiberally enough by the art-dealers, art-critics, and academic hanging-committees, to say nothing of the art public; well, it was of some other than the Marquis that Hobbema B., returning in moonlight from a choice assemblage, where he had been introduced to him, and undergone the inevitable fascination of the contact; it was of him that Brown enthusiastically exclaimed to his companion: ‘What a godsend to meet such a man! He is a set-off against the battalions of his contraries. Between you and me, mankind taken in a lump are the gods’ job-lot; but, by heaven, the race that can produce a Marquis de Grandvin is not promiscuously to be contemned!’ See there how the talismanic something in the sort of nature here indicated can operate upon another nature though of a temper not favourably disposed to receive its benign influence.