sombre sense of the dreadful destiny of mankind at large, nor their appetite for applause been impaired by their profound conviction of the folly and contemptibility of the people by whom it is offered. A Timon, not at all of the nobler sort, seems to have been that great light of recent German philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer. As Schopenhauer died childless, it will, I hope, hurt the feelings of no one if we dissect his character candidly as that of the most prominent Pessimist of the age. It will be instructive, I think, to learn the “notes” of such a character,--to study, in short, of what kind of stuff (so to speak) a Pessimist is occasionally made. In justice, we must carry in mind that Schopenhauer accomplished a good deal in the philosophic way, besides preaching Pessimism. He worked out a metaphysical system of considerable depth and ingenuity,--one of the merits of which, at all events, may be accounted that it is readily applicable to quite other views than those of its author, respecting the nature and destiny of mankind. With this formidable system, elaborated in his great work, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, we have, however (happily for me, and probably for my reader), for our present purpose, no concern whatever, but only with his actions and character, such as Miss Zimmern, condensing the original German memoirs, sketched in a life-like and transparently truthful manner in her Life of Schopenhauer. The first “note” of Schopenhauer’s character, I should say, was his HEARTLESSNESS. He seems scarcely to have loved anybody--in any sense of the word worth considering--from his cradle to his grave. He made, indeed, after his father’s death, much parade of respect for his memory; but his filial piety, such as it was, stopped short at this point. He disliked his sprightly, good-natured mother, and treated her with singular insolence. As to friendship, he avowed his opinion that “men of much intellectual worth, more especially if they have genius, can have but few friends”; and he verified his own dictum as a first-rate genius by having, so far as we may judge, no real friends at all, though in later life, when he became celebrated, he had numerous flatterers and disciples. Love was even less in Schopenhauer’s way than friendship, unless we are to call by the title the passion in its coarsest form. His opinion was that “the poetry of love is mainly illusion, a glittering drapery meant to mantle the solemnity of the thing as it really is” (p. 222); and his actions were quite in accordance with this crass materialism. He led, his biographer states, “no saintly ascetic life, nor did he pretend to this eminence.... He despised women.... He was only different from ordinary men in that he spoke of what others suppressed; and his over-zealous disciples, who saw the god-like in all his acts, even dragged these to the light of day.” His “careless dallying with beauty” (a euphemism, I presume, for