nearly akin to Villiers de l’Isle Adam, with his religion and his love of the fine gesture.  Had he been a Frenchman of an earlier generation, he would have been famous for his talk, like Villiers, in the cafes.  Most people who knew him contend that he talked even better than he wrote; but one gets a good enough example of his ruling mood and attitude in the fine essay called On Saying Good-bye. Meditating on life as “a sustained good-bye,” he writes: 

     Life is a cheap table d’hote in a rather dirty restaurant, with
     Time changing the plates before you have had enough of anything.

We were bewildered at school to be told that walking was a perpetual falling.  But life is, in a far more significant way, a perpetual dying.  Death is not an eccentricity, but a settled habit of the universe.  The drums of to-day call to us, as they call to young Fortinbras in the fifth act of Hamlet, over corpses piled up in such abundance as to be almost ridiculous.  We praise the pioneer, but we praise him on wrong grounds.  His strength lies not in his leaning out to new things—­that may be mere curiosity—­but in his power to abandon old things.  All his courage is a courage of adieus.

This meditativeness on the passing nature of things is one of the old moods of mankind.  Kettle, however, was one of the men of our time in whom it has achieved imaginative expression.  I remember his once saying, in regard to some hostile criticisms that had been passed on his own “power to abandon old things”:  “The whole world is nothing but the story of a renegade.  The bud is renegade to the tree, and the flower to the bud, and the fruit to the flower.”  Though he rejoiced in change as a politician, however, he bewaited the necessity of change as a philosopher.  His praise of death in the essay I have just quoted from is the praise of something that will put an end to changes and goodbyes

There is only one journey, as it seems to me ... in which we attain our ideal of going away and going home at the same time.  Death, normally encountered, has all the attractions of suicide without any of its horrors.  The old woman—­

an old woman previously mentioned who complained that “the only bothersome thing about walking was that the miles began at the wrong end”—­

the old woman when she comes to that road will find the miles beginning at the right end.  We shall all bid our first real adieu to those brother-jesters of ours, Time; and Space; and though the handkerchiefs flutter, no lack of courage will have power to cheat or defeat us.  “However amusing the comedy may have been,” wrote Pascal, “there is always blood in the fifth act.  They scatter a little dust in your face; and then all is over for ever.”  Blood there may be, but blood does not necessarily mean tragedy.  The wisdom of humility bids us pray that in that fifth act we may have good lines and a timely exit; but, fine or feeble, there