and simple, or gay and innocently festal nature; beauty inbred, and then marred by some rough contact, and then marred more by social punishment, and seldom retrieved, even in part--as in the particular instance it chanced to be retrieved--by any fortunate and final escape. All this revolts the deepest of human feelings, which distinguishes us from most of the beasts, namely the æsthetic feeling, which at this point happens to coincide closely with the religious. A certain depth and rarity were thus super-added to the plain good feeling and kindliness of the man; and we can draw these facts from the jealous hiding-place of the past without undue violence to the shyness in which he wrapped them, as they show his personal and special path of approach to the human tragedy, and may even come to the notice of, and serve for the encouragement of similar minds at a corresponding stage of discontent. We may now go back to his early youth, when he was halfway through Oxford, and when some of these ideas were germinating into necessarily crude expression, which none the less has its interest. In a letter of 1881, he writes:-- "How can we escape from Swinburne? Does not modern society drive one to his school, at least the sort of society that I am _supposed_ to have been brought up in, whose moral atmosphere is a sort of perpetual afternoon tea, where all the men are pale young curates and the women district visitors, their excitements vulgar ritualistic tea-pot tempests, the doctrinal significance of birettas, purificators.... Their minds ever on the alert to quash the smallest expression of any delight in natural beauty--'beauty is only skin-deep,' the damnedest lie that was ever formulated (compare Browning's Paracelsus). I wish with Gautier that I had been born in the days of the Roman Empire, when asceticism was almost unknown and what there was of it entirely specialised, before ever such an astounding classification as the World, the Flesh, and the Devil had been made, or every natural beauty writhed, like the divine feminine torso, in the accused grip of fashion." These are the outpourings of a very young man only twenty. It may fairly be said that Johnstone was always far more of an ascetic, personally, than he ever admitted, and the articles on Bach and Sir Edward Elgar abundantly prove the religious habit of mind induced by the training and associations of his early years. A year later his views have become better balanced, as shown by the following extract from a letter on the same subject.