Not to exaggerate the importance of the “School” (if such it can be accounted) of European Buddhists, we may, I think, properly afford to its existence the attention due to a remarkable “fault” in the strata of recent thought, and still more fitly ponder on the significant tokens, scattered through current literature, of pessimist tendencies quite other than the Western world has hitherto exhibited. Our modern owls may be heard responding to each other in their turrets of the _Nineteenth Century_ and the _Fortnightly Review_,--sometimes solemnly and seriously, as when Mr. Morley wrote of “that droning, piteous chronicle of wrong and cruelty and despair which everlastingly saddens the compassionating ear like the moaning of a midnight sea”; sometimes with odious pretension and self-conceit when smaller men and foolish women hoot and croak. In the brightest intellectual circles, many of us have learned to listen with well-bred calmness to assertions from smiling gentlemen and beautifully dressed ladies touching the general wrongness of all things, and the particular wretchedness of human nature, which, did we believe them, would cause us to rush from the dinner-table and hang ourselves on the nearest lamp-post. In Germany, matters have proceeded further; and Schopenhauer has been for some time as much the fashionable Philosopher, as Wagner is the Musician, of the age. Of course there are various degrees and kinds of Pessimism everywhere to be noted. There is the Philanthropic Pessimist who thinks his fellow-creatures are merely wretched; and the Misanthropic Pessimist, who thinks them both wretched and despicable. There is the Theistic Pessimist, who still believes in God, but considers Him either to be a “baffled Ormusd,” or else to look down from such heights on human affairs as to regard them no more than we do the politics and catastrophes of an ant-hill. And, finally, there is the Atheistic Pessimist, who has abandoned the notion of an Intelligence at the helm of the Universe, and believes only in a blind Force, irresponsible for all the misery and crime of which He--or rather It--is the cause. For all these varied kinds of Pessimism there seem to be two quite distinct sources,--a good and noble, and a bad and base one. Each of these sources leads to results having an outward apparent similarity, and accordingly creates an illusory resemblance between the feelings and expressions of persons whose characters and actions are wide as the poles asunder. Let me endeavor to discriminate them.