SOLITUDE AND SOCIETY.

I fell in with a humorist, on my travels, who had in his chamber a cast of the Rondanini Medusa, and who assured me that the name which that fine work of art bore in the catalogues was a misnomer, as he was convinced that the sculptor who carved it intended it for Memory, the mother of the Muses.  In the conversation that followed, my new friend made some extraordinary confessions.  “Do you not see,” he said, “the penalty of learning, and that each of these scholars whom you have met at S., though he were to be the last man, would, like the executioner in Hood’s poem, guillotine the last but one?” He added many lively remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and, in the weeks that followed, we became better acquainted.  He had great abilities, a genial temper, and no vices; but he had one defect,—­he could not speak in the tone of the people.  There was some paralysis on his will, that, when he met men on common terms, he spoke weakly, and from the point, like a flighty girl.  His consciousness of the fault made it worse.  He envied every daysman and drover in the tavern their manly speech.  He coveted Mirabeau’s don terrible de la familiarite, believing that he whose sympathy goes lowest is the man from whom kings have the most to fear.  For himself, he declared that he could not get enough alone to write a letter to a friend.  He left the city; he hid himself in pastures.  The solitary river was not solitary enough; the sun and moon put him out.  When he bought a house, the first thing he did was to plant trees.  He could not enough conceal himself.  Set a hedge here; set oaks there,—­trees behind trees; above all, set evergreens, for they will keep a secret all the year round.  The most agreeable compliment you could pay him was, to say that you had not observed him in a house or a street where you had met him.  Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was not.  All he wished of his tailor was, to provide that sober mean of color and cut which would never detain the eye for a moment.  He went to Vienna, to Smyrna, to London.  In all the variety of costumes, a carnival, a kaleidoscope of clothes, to his horror he could never discover a man in the street who wore anything like his own dress.  He would have given his soul for the ring of Gyges.  His dismay at his visibility had blunted the fears of mortality.  “Do you think,” he said, “I am in such great terror of being shot,—­I, who am only waiting to shuffle off my corporeal jacket, to slip away into the back stars, and put diameters of the solar system and sidereal orbits between me and all souls,—­there to wear out ages in solitude, and forget memory itself, if it be possible?” He had a remorse running to despair of his social gaucheries, and walked miles and miles to get the twitchings out of his face, the starts and shrugs out of his arms and shoulders.  “God may forgive sins,” he said, “but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.”  He admired in Newton, not so much his theory of the moon, as his letter to Collins, in which he forbade him to insert his name with the solution of the problem in the “Philosophical Transactions”:  “It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline.”