illogically enough, he had never thought others insignificant; he had never reached the cynical conclusion that nobody matters very much. If his friends and his sympathies were so few, it was not because the outside world did not matter to him, but because he could not believe that he mattered to the outside world. He had died without ever having learned his own value. A parcel which was forwarded to Maurice from Mrs. Meyner shortly afterwards contained the many note-books which her husband had filled with the evidence he had collected, and the work he had done, until death interrupted him. With them was a simple and pathetic letter that he had written to Maurice on the day before he died. “Look through them,” the letter said, in reference to the note-books. “You will see and understand what I was aiming at. If you think it worth while, carry on the investigation which I began; I own that it is some pleasure to me to think that it is possible that you may do so; that one who was intimate with my views, and who shared some of my opinions, which are not generally held, may be able to give those views and opinions their justification. But I do not want you to pledge yourself in any way, nor do I ask you to give up your tripos or your career at college for the purpose.” Maurice paused as he read this last sentence. How often he had thought, as he turned English verse into indifferent alcaics, that this classical work could only lead, was only educative, could never be considered as an end. But he came to no final decision until he had spent nearly a month in a rapid survey of those note-books. They startled him; the minute accuracy and patience shown in the collection of evidence were only what he expected from such a man as Meyner, but the brilliant audacity of his theories, the almost savage independence of an original mind, looked far different when plainly stated in black and white, than when they had fallen humbly and almost hesitatingly from the man’s own lips. The romantic side in Maurice’s character was touched most by what was worst in Meyner’s books; the finished and unprejudiced scholar would have shaken his head over much that looked like vain imagining, that was extravagant, and, so far, unsupported. Maurice was younger; Meyner’s fierce opposition of an accepted view attracted him, and awoke his pugnacity. He would linger over page after page of what seemed to him splendid conjecture, of what might have seemed to others very useless stuff, and say to himself: “If only one could prove that this _is_ so, instead of longing that it _may_ be so!” The air of conviction with which Meyner wrote down his own views on his own subject gained immeasurably in Maurice’s eyes from the personal knowledge which Maurice had of Meyner’s perpetual tendency to undervalue himself, and to distrust himself in all other matters. Even with these views in his mind, he had expected no great results; he had been too honest to support them with any evidence that