Here would be the place, were I equal to it, to speak of him as a man and as a writer. After the manner of some biographers, perhaps I ought to see him standing alone, in lofty transports of thought and inspiring actions. On the contrary, I should much prefer to see him doing ordinary things. I would like to bring him near to us. I would like to make him more than a mysterious person. But both of these views are denied us. It is not as though Dunlevy were a statue which could be observed from any angle. I have had to take him as I found him. In his life that has left behind it so few traces, I am at a loss for facts upon which to base any judgment. If I may speak for myself, I own that I have little intellectual sympathy with him in any way. I find nothing hopeful or inspiring in his writings. Somehow, he was always striving, and always failing, to go to the bottom of everything. He wished to give proof of more penetration and ethical intuition than he possessed. Are not his thoughts, after all, superficial? Does he get us anywhere? We, in this workaday age, must _get_ somewhere. Sometimes I think that the chief reason why certain novels have plots is to get us to the end of the book, and that _is_ somewhere. “He teaches nothing, because he decides nothing; it is the very opposite of dogmatism. He is vain.--Hey! all men are, are they not? And those who seem modest, are not they doubly vain? The _I_ and the _me_ are on every line; but how should we ever have any knowledge except through the _I_ and the _me_?” So wrote Madame DuDeffand once in a letter to Horace Walpole.