ephemeral are the actual triumphs and how small the real value of nearly all the questions he thus vitalized into artistic reality, when compared with the great outlying truths and principles to which he allied them.  Feeling this all through his cases, at the same time that he was moulding them and giving them dramatic vitality, they took their true position from natural reaction and rebound, with all the more sharpness of contrast, when he came out of them.  With such a nature, it could be assumed a priori as a psychological certainty, at any rate it was the fact with him, that a certain unreality was at times thrown over life and its objects, that its projects and ambitions seemed games and mockeries, and “this brave o’erhanging firmament a pestilent congregation of vapors,” and that grave doubts and fears on the great questions of existence were ever on the horizon of his mind.  This gave perpetual play to his irony, and made it a necessity and a relief of mind.  Except when in earnest in some larger matter, or closely occupied in accomplishing some smaller necessary purpose or duty, his imagination loved the tricksy play of exhibiting the petty side of life in contrast to its realities, just as in his cases it found its exercise in lifting them up to relations with what is poetic and permanent.  But, though irony was thus the natural language of his mind, it did not pass beyond the limits of the mischievous and kindly, because there was nothing scoffing or bitter in his nature.  It was fresh and natural, never studied for effect, and gave his conversation the charm of constant novelty and surprises.  He loved to condense the results of thought and study into humorous or grotesque overstatements, which, while they amused his hearers, conveyed his exact meaning to every one who followed the mercurial movement of his mind.  It will readily be seen how a person with neither insight into his nature nor apprehension of his meaning should, without intending it, misinterpret his life and caricature his opinions,—­blundering only the more deeply when trying to be literally exact in reporting conversations or portraying character.

It has been shrewdly said, that, “when the Lord wants anything done in this world, he makes a man a little wrong-headed in the right direction.”  With this goes the disposition to overestimate the importance of one’s work and to push principles and theories towards extremes.  The saying is true of some individuals at or before certain crises in affairs; it is not true of the great inevitable historical movements, any more than the history of revolutions is the history of nations.  Halifax is called a trimmer.  William Wilberforce was a reformer.  Each did a great work.  But it would be simply absurd, except in the estimation of the moral purist, to call Wilberforce as great a man or as great an historical and influential person as Halifax.  Halifax saw and acted in the clear light and large relations in which the great historian of our own