to alarm his readers, and conscious of addressing a public which regards the question of human equality as having been finally settled a hundred years ago, deliberately avoided bringing forward opinions that savour of Oriental despotism. But seeing that every line of Nietzsche's writings is animated by such opinions, it is impossible to deal with the subject at all without shocking the ideas of a democratic age. Nietzsche, it should be remembered, was a belated scion of the proudest, most turbulent, and most ruthlessly tyrannical aristocracy that ever existed. He witnessed, with despairing rage, both the success of vulgarity in that modern Europe which had ruined his ancient and noble race, and what he regarded as the progressive depreciation of the high-bred qualities in human nature under the influence of socialistic ideas. Though nowhere expressly stated, the thought of his people, disinherited for their inability to adapt themselves to the modern spirit, is never absent from his consciousness, and he uses his matchless literary power to tell the men of an industrial and co-operative civilisation what the last of genuine aristocrats thinks of them. With advancing years Nietzsche became less and less German and more and more Polish, till after the break with Wagner and Schopenhauer we find him openly satirising everything German. He has, in fact, "reverted to type," and from 1876 onwards he figures as a feudal aristocrat in exile. In his general type of culture Nietzsche was very un-English. The questions of æsthetics have never been treated in this country as anything but an affair of dilettantes--at best a superior kind of trifling; whereas for Nietzsche they were a matter of life and death. And if it is a point of conscience with cultivated Englishmen to take some interest in graphic and plastic art, we have nevertheless practically excluded music from our scheme of culture. We have, perhaps, advanced a little beyond Lord Chesterfield's view of music as a pursuit leading to nothing but waste of time and bad company, and an English nobleman of the present day would probably hesitate to lay down, as Lord Chesterfield laid down, that the legitimate claims of music upon the attention of a cultivated man are adequately met by the occasional giving of a penny to a fiddler. Yet in the depths of his consciousness the typical Englishman has still a tendency to regard the disputes of the musical world as Byron regarded the Handel and Buononcini controversy:-- "Strange all this difference should be 'Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee."