and arrogant since the days when we Metazoa were young in the world. That is the one master-thought of Nature, or--shall we say?--her systematised delusion, her _délire à forme chronique_. But the malady, if it is one, is incurable. A friend of mine, under the influence of nitrous oxide, once found himself face to face with the Almighty. Being a man of earnest and philosophic temperament, he took advantage of the opportunity to demand passionately the meaning and aim of this tangled skein of things in which we find ourselves: “Why have You placed us here? For what purpose have You submitted us to all this strife and misery? What is the solution of the riddle of life?” And then, uttered in a characteristic bass, came in one word the awful reply which my friend will never forget: “_Procreation_.” I fear that that voice is, or might well have been, divine. And yet why should one “fear”? We have our brief triumph. Seeking out many curious things, we learn to know and to enjoy the earth. Nature’s naughty children--whether artists or scientists or mystics--we may stand aside, contemplate her great object, and impudently elevate our fingers to our nose. It amuses us, and scarcely hurts her. She cannot refuse us the by-play of her own adaptations. For it all comes of that primitive manifestation of the new spirit, the “Fall,” which raised us on to our hind limbs and enabled us to drink of the Cider of Paradise. H. E. _7th October, 1892._ PREFACE. From our earliest days we look out into the world with wide-eyed amazement, trying to discover for ourselves what it is like. Instinctively we must spend a great part of our lives in searching and probing into the nature and drift of the things among which, by a volition not our own, we were projected. To-day, when we stand, as it were, at the beginning of a new era, and when we have been celebrating the centenary of the most significant event in modern history, an individual who, for his own guidance, has done his part in this searching and probing, may perhaps be allowed to present some of the results, not claiming to be an expert, not desiring to impose on others any private scheme of the universe. The pulse of life runs strong and fast; I have tried to bring a sensitive lever to that pulse here and there, to determine and record, as delicately as I could, its rhythms: the papers I now present might be called a bundle of sphygmographic tracings. A large part of one’s investigations into the spirit of one’s time must be made through the medium of literary personalities. I have selected five such typical individuals; it is the intimate thought and secret emotions of such men that become the common property of after generations.