twenty years, to be the esteemed friend of a lady married to another, without hope of any closer relation; and when his death permits them to think of marriage, they have only seven years and a half before them, and he is forty-five years old. Cases of this kind would be discouraging in the extreme degree, were it not that the difficulty is exceptional. High intellect is in itself a peculiarity, in a certain sense it is really an eccentricity, even when so thoroughly sane and rational as in the cases of George Eliot, Goethe, and Mill. It is an eccentricity in this sense, that its mental centre does not coincide with that of ordinary people. The mental centre of ordinary people is simply the public opinion, the common sense, of the class and locality in which they live, so that, to them, the common sense of people in another class, another locality, appears irrational or absurd. The mental centre of a superior person is not that of class and locality. Shelley did not belong to the English aristocracy, though he was born in it; his mind did not centre itself in aristocratic ideas. George Eliot did not belong to the middle class of the English midlands, nor Stuart Mill to the London middle classes. So far as Byron belonged to the aristocracy it was a mark of inferiority in him, owing to a touch of vulgarity in his nature, the same vulgarity which made him believe that he could not be a proper sort of lord without a prodigal waste of money. Yet even Byron was not centred in local ideas; that which was best in him, his enthusiasm for Greece, was not an essential part of Nottinghamshire common sense. Goethe lived much more in one locality, and even in a small place; but if anything is remarkable in him it is his complete independence of Weimar ideas. It was the Duke, his friend and master, not the public opinion of Weimar, that allowed Goethe to be himself. He refused even to be classed intellectually, and did not recognize the vulgar opinion that a poet cannot be scientific. In all these cases the mental centre was not in any local common sense. It was a result of personal studies and observations acting upon an individual idiosyncrasy.