Defence of

Landor.

with titles because they disputed his higher title.

Kate Field in her articles written some time ago on the last days of Landor, has shown the most agreeable side of his nature, and she thus defends him from the charge of egotism.

"Shall Landor be branded with intense egotism for claiming immortality? Can it be denied that he will be read with admiration as long as printing and the English language endure? Can there be greatness without conscious power? . . . . Egotism is the belief of narrow minds in the supreme significance of a mortal self. Conscious power is the belief in certain immortal attributes, emanating from and productive of, Youth and Beauty."

CHAPTER III.

hauer's

compla

cency.

How delightful it must be to feel so im- Schopenportant, so above the common herd! Scho- colossal selfpenhauer, the pessimistic philosopher, was another extraordinary example of self-complacency. As he grew older, Schopenhauer learned to express his good opinion of himself and his works with the serenest equanimity. No more naïve expressions of self-complacency have perhaps ever been penned, than this gentleman's eulogiums on his own productions; as, for example, when he writes to the publisher of his work that "its worth and importance are so great, that I do not venture to express it even toward you, because you could not believe me," and proceeds to quote a review "which speaks of me with the highest praise, and I am plainly the greatest philosopher of the age, which is really saying much less than the good

Shopenhauer's

tite.

man thinks.” Sir," he said to an unoffending stranger who watched him across a tabled'hote (where he habitually acted the part of the local "lion"); "Sir, you are astonished at my appetite. True, I eat three times as hearty appe- much as you, but then I have three times as much mind." The reader who thinks that this speech could never have been spoken except in jest, and to produce a goodhumored laugh, has not yet studied Schopenhauer's saturnine temperament, to which a joke at his own expense must have been quite inconceivable. His intense contempt for women wavered when he saw that they could feel an interest in his works.

His contempt of human-kind and of his

raries.

To contempt of human-kind Schopenhauer added an immense conceit of his own philcontempo- osophic importance. "He did not hesitate," says F. H. Hedge, "to declare himself the foremost philosopher of all time. I have lifted farther than any mortal before me the veil of truth; but I would like to see the man who can boast of having had a more wretched set of contemporaries than I"meaning Schelling and Hegel, and the philosophic and learned world of his day. He

7

actually believed that the University philosophers were afraid of him-were afraid that if he came to be known they would fall at once into hopeless neglect, and therefore had combined to suppress him! And how he chuckles at their defeat when, in his latter years, he began to emerge a little from his long obscurity. "Their Caspar Hauser," he says, "has escaped, in spite of their machinations. I am read, and shall continue to be read; legor et legar."

of his chief

When in 1818 Schopenhauer offered his Description principal work to the publisher Brockhaus, work. in Leipzig, he described it in the following words:

"My work is a new philosophical system -new in every sense of the word; not merely a new presentation of old truths, but a closely-connected series of ideas which have hitherto never yet entered into any one's head. I am firmly convinced that the book in which I have accomplished the difficult task of presenting these ideas in a clear light to others, is one of those which subsequently become the source and occasion of a hundred others."

Karoline
Bauer's

sketch of
Schlegel.

His foppish dress.

Hegel regretted when dying that he should leave but one person in the world who understood his philosophy, and he was not certain that he grasped it entirely.

In the Memoirs of Karoline Bauer, the accomplished German comedienne, I find an interesting picture of Schlegel, the profound Shakesperian critic, as he appeared to this bright woman.

"My talented colleague and countrywoman, the youthful tragedienne of the Viennal Burg Theatre, Sophie Müller, had come to Berlin for a temporary engagement in 1827. When I returned her visit, I found seated beside her on the sofa an old, active little gentleman, dressed up like a May-pole, very affected, wearing a wig of fair curls, having his lips and spare cheeks painted with rouge, clad most foppishly according to the latest fashion, decked with the most variegated orders, turning a gold snuff-box, upon which might be seen the turbaned portrait of Madame de Staël, between his well-kept fingers sparkling with jewels, and casting complacent looks into the mirror which was attached, under the lid, to the inside of the snuff-box.