denounced; not to know me is to write yourself down a dunce; and, yet, have I done as much for the good of my kind as this or that humble friend, who would be astonished were his name ever to be uttered in public?" Some such thought, for example, is inspired by Johnson's most pathetic verses, when the great lexicographer, the acknowledged dictator of English literature, thought of the poor dependant, the little humble quack doctor, Levett, who was content, literally, to be fed with the crumbs from his tables. But the obscure dependant, as the patron felt, had done all that he could to alleviate the sum of human misery. His virtues walked their narrow round, Nor made a pause, nor left a void; And, sure, the Eternal Master found The single talent well employed. Have I not, Johnson seems to have felt, really done less to soothe misery by my _Dictionary_ and my _Ramblers_ than this obscure labourer in the back lanes of London, of whom, but for my verses, no one would have heard even the name? A full answer to questions suggested by these thoughts would, perhaps, require an estimate of the relative value of different aims and different functions in life; and, for such an estimate, there are no adequate grounds. In one of Browning's noblest poems, Rabbi Ben Ezra--of whom I must say that he strikes me as being a little too self-complacent--puts a relevant question. "Who," he asks, "shall arbitrate?" Ten men love what I hate; Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; Ten who, in ears and eyes, Match me; we all surmise, They this thing and I that: whom shall my soul believe? And he answers or suggests one condition of a satisfactory answer, by saying that we are not to take the coarse judgment of the world, which goes by the work achieved. We must remember-- All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That, weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's account; Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act; Fancies that broke through language and escaped; All I would never be, All men ignored in me, That I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.