The intellectual world of the later nineteenth century has no more remarkable and original, and also no more tragic, figure to show than the author of these essays. He was descended from a noble Polish family originally named Nietzky, who gave up their title and estates and settled in Germany on account of Protestant convictions. Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844. He received a classical education, and at twenty-eight years of age became Professor of Classical Philology in the University of Bâle; but throughout life his love of art, and especially of music, remained an absorbing passion. It appears that his musical instinct was first aroused by the works of Schumann, and that youthful enthusiasm led to serious musical studies. Later on he became the most ardent of Wagnerians, and finally the fiercest of Wagner's assailants. Nietzsche's earliest writings are academic monographs on various classical subjects, the brilliant scholarship of which led to his appointment at Bâle. The philosophical essays began to appear towards his thirtieth year, during his professorship at Bâle. There are verses, too, by Nietzsche which exhibit a genuine poetic faculty. The manner and order of Nietzsche's mental awakening is worthy of attention--first, the love of music, leading to a general interest in art; next, philological studies, originally undertaken, in the opinion of his sister Madame Förster-Nietzsche, as a relief from the feverish problems of modern æsthetics, and pursued to such purpose that he became a master of Roman and Greek learning. His writings also reveal a wide knowledge of Hebrew and Indian literature, besides thorough familiarity with all that is of first-rate importance in modern thought. His first intellectual master seems to have been Schopenhauer. In the year 1889 Nietzsche became hopelessly insane. There is not the least trace of mental disorder in the previous family history. The stocks from which he was descended were on both sides of exceptional energy, ability, and character. There is also abundant testimony to the simplicity, amiability, and charm of his personal character. His friends and colleagues at Bâle seem to have had no suspicion of the explosive energies which appear in his writings. His tastes were throughout life reserved and fastidious, and the ultimate breakdown of his mind can only be attributed to the sheer excess of feverish energy with which he lived the intellectual life and to the effects of spiritual isolation upon a sensitive and most arrogant nature. He now lies to all intents and purposes dead at Naumburg-on-the-Saale, in Saxony, which for the past fifty years has been the home of the family.