It is actually ludicrous to compare this man’s intensely selfish, vain, cowardly character with the magnificent compliments which he paid to virtue in the abstract, and to the ideal he draws of the perfect man, or “ascetic,” in whom the very sense of individuality, not to speak of self-regard, is annihilated: “He will no longer regard himself as a real existence, comprised within the rigid line of personality, and thus insulated and differentiated from the rest of the universe. He will regard his separate being as a mere transitory phenomenon, a temporary objectivation of the sole real existence; and this recognition of his true position must necessarily destroy selfishness.... When a man ceases to draw an egotistic distinction between himself and others, and takes as much part in their sorrows as in his own, it naturally follows that such a one, recognizing his own self in all beings, must regard the endless griefs of all beings as his own, and thus appropriate to himself the sorrows of the whole world.”[17] The modern “Man of Sorrows” (if we may venture on so irreverent a comparison for the sake of the contrast) had, for his own use, an easy method of “appropriating” the griefs of his kind. “We gather,” says his keen-sighted critic of the _Contemporary Review_, “from the accounts of his disciples, that he had arranged for himself an existence more than tolerable; for, while free from positive annoyance, he found a perfectly consistent and legitimate source of pleasure in the disinterested contemplation of the idea of the world’s sorrows.”[18] A more easy form of martyrdom it is hard to imagine. Is it not somewhat surprising that a man like this, who, to do him justice, made no pretence of practising what he taught, but said openly, with cynical effrontery, “I preach sanctity, but I am no saint,”[19] should have exercised any influence over his generation? We read, however, that “his little band of disciples grew, and their fanaticism reached a ludicrous point. One entreated him to found a trust for the purpose of keeping watch that no syllable of his works should ever be altered; another had his portrait painted and placed in a room like a chapel,”[20] etc.