The second “note” in Schopenhauer’s character was his exceeding COWARDICE. The modern Socrates would have deserted Athens at the plague, and run away at Potidæa. With what poltroonery he would have behaved, when required to drink the hemlock, it is impossible to imagine. When his country was in the throes of war and political crises, Schopenhauer always carefully moved out of the way. When there was any kind of infectious disease prevalent, he fled to another city, so that half his journeys were mere panic flights. He left Berlin for fear of the cholera, Naples from alarm of the small-pox, and Verona because he took it into his head that his snuff was poisoned. He slept with loaded pistols close to his hand, and seized them at the slightest noise. When the postman brought him a letter, he started. He used a cup of his own to avoid the contagion which might lurk in a glass at a public table. He labelled his valuables with deceptive names, and wrote his business memoranda in Greek. As we have seen, he was not bellicose. Only once in his life is it recorded that he struck a blow, and that was at a woman. Finding an acquaintance of his landlady presumptuous enough to hold a coffee-party in his anteroom, Schopenhauer knocked her down with such violence that her right arm was permanently disabled. Any other man, who had committed an act of similar brutality in a moment of passion, would probably have hastened to offer some compensation to his victim; but our philosopher, on the contrary, hotly contested the poor woman’s suit for legal redress, and quitted the town in disgust when he found himself compelled to maintain her for life,--a period which (the non-sympathetic reader will rejoice to learn) was extremely prolonged. The writer of an exceedingly able and thoughtful review of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in the _Contemporary Review_, some years ago, observed that his unamiable traits are best excused by his own candid avowal that he liked his own mental physiognomy well enough, but his moral not at all. The _unalterableness of the natural character_ was one of his favorite dogmas. Certainly, the self-training by which many a naturally nervous temperament has disciplined itself into courage, a selfish one into generosity, and a morose or peevish temper into gentleness, was as far as possible from Schopenhauer’s plan of life; and it opens to us a rather alarming idea of the society of the future, if his followers generally should resolve to adopt his facile principle, and assume that their “natural characters,” whatever they may chance to be,--selfish, false, dissolute, or cruel,--are “unalterable.” Such liberty, however, is probably reserved for those who may claim to be “men of genius” like their master, since he absolved himself from the ordinary duties incumbent on meaner mortals by the help of a theory which we may call the Philosopher’s Anti-nomianism. “He weighed his duties toward the