In a generation full of privilege and hardship, and weary of its own artificial ways, such teaching as this struck a resounding chord. It did not matter that the teacher reconciled a rather sordid practice with a gorgeous theory, and was himself too often morbid, egotistical, unmanly, mean. The disciples, who drank in his doctrines, did not enquire critically into his motives. They did not ask--and possibly we have not the right to speculate--whether he assailed society, because he failed to shine in it, or whether he inveighed against riches, because he lacked the patient industry to earn them for himself. They did not know or care whether his quarrel with the world, his indictment of its usages and laws, his eloquent defence of human instinct, and his sensuous love for Nature, were or were not dictated by the feverish longing which possessed the man to follow every impulse of his mind, and to submit his impulses to no control. They did not see that the example of a master, who, whatever shameful faults he might commit, could still maintain that civilization, and not he, deserved the blame, and could still gravely describe himself to his friends as one of the best men that he had ever known, was only too well calculated to enable his disciples to persuade themselves that they were instruments of virtue, purity and justice, while they were permitting iniquity and palliating crime. They knew that his denunciation of oppression coincided with the bitter lessons which their experience taught. They found that his eloquent words renewed their self-respect, and raised their ideal of the dignity of man. They felt that he pleaded the cause of the unfortunate in tones and with a genius which made the fortunate attend, and that he brought to that exalted service the widest compassion, the readiest sympathy, and the most majestic language which the eighteenth century had heard.