This interest he was the first to laugh at, and to disappoint. He shrunk from all admiration, and from all sympathy. At the moment when a crowd assembled round him, and every ear was bent to catch the words, which came alike from so beautiful a lip, and so strange and imaginative a mind, it was his pleasure to utter some sentiment totally different from his written opinion, and utterly destructive of the sensation he had excited. But it was very rarely that he exposed himself to these “trials of an author.” He went out little to any other house but Lady Roseville’s, and it was seldom more than once a week that he was seen even there. Lonely, and singular in mind and habits, he lived in the world like a person occupied by a separate object, and possessed of a separate existence, from that of his fellow-beings. He was luxurious and splendid, beyond all men, in his habits, rather than his tastes. His table groaned beneath a weight of gold, too costly for the daily service even of a prince; but he had no pleasure in surveying it. His wines and viands were of the most exquisite description; but he scarcely tasted them. Yet, what may seem inconsistent, he was averse to all ostentation and show in the eyes of others. He admitted very few into his society--no one so intimately as myself. I never once saw more than three persons at his table. He seemed, in his taste for furniture, in his love of literature, and his pursuit after fame, to be, as he himself said, eternally endeavouring to forget and eternally brought back to remembrance. “I pity that man even more than I admire him,” said Vincent to me, one night when we were walking home from Glanville’s house. “His is, indeed, the disease nulla medicabilis herba. Whether it is the past or the present that afflicts him--whether it is the memory of past evil, or the satiety of present good, he has taken to his heart the bitterest philosophy of life. He does not reject its blessings--he gathers them around him, but as a stone gathers moss--cold, hard, unsoftened by the freshness and the greenness which surround it. As a circle can only touch a circle in one place, every thing that life presents to him, wherever it comes from--to whatever portion of his soul it is applied--can find but one point of contact; and that is the soreness of affliction: whether it is the oblivio or the otium that he requires, he finds equally that he is for ever in want of one treasure:--‘neque gemmis neque purpura venale nec auro.’” CHAPTER XLVIII. Mons. Jourdain. Etes-vous fou de l’aller quereller’ lui qui entend la tierce et la quarte, et qui sait tuer un homme par raison demonstrative? Le Maitre a Danser. Je me moque de sa raison demonstrative, et de sa tierce et de sa quarte.--Moliere.