Without a life of singular temperance, without unusual moral principle and self-command, he would long ago have fallen like other men of genius of his passionate type.  He outlived “consumptive” tendencies in youth; and the repeated indications of over-strain in later life, up to the time of his first serious break-down in 1878, had issued in nothing more than the depression and fatigue with which most busy men are familiar.  He had been accustomed to hear himself called mad—­the defence of Turner was thought by the dilettanti of the time to be possible only to a lunatic; the author of “Stones of Venice,” we saw, was insane in the eyes of his critic, the architect; it was seriously whispered when he wrote on Political Economy that Ruskin was out of his mind; and so on.  Every new thing he put forward “made Quintilian stare and gasp,” and soi-disant friends shake their heads, until a still newer nine-days’ wonder appeared from his pen.  The break-down of 1878, so difficult to explain to his public, made it appear that the common reproach might after all be coming true.  The recurrence of a similar illness in 1881 and 1882 made it still more to be feared.  It seemed as though his life’s work was to be invalidated by his age’s failure; it seemed that the stale, shallow reproach might only too easily be justifiable.

These attacks of mental disease, which at his recall to Oxford seemed to have been safely distanced, after his resignation began again at more and more frequent intervals.  Crash after crash of tempest fell upon him—­clearing away for a while only to return with fiercer fury, until they left him beaten down and helpless at last, to learn that he must accept the lesson and bow before the storm.  Like another prophet who had been very jealous for the Lord God of Hosts, he was to feel tempest and earthquake and fire pass over him, before hearing the still small voice that bade him once more take courage, and live in quietness and in confidence, for the sake of those whom he had forgotten, when he cried, “I, even I only, am left.”

From one who has been out in the storm the reader will not expect a cool recital of its effects.  The delirium of brain-fever brings strange things to pass; and, no doubt, afforded ground for the painful gossip, of which there has been more than enough—­much of it absurdly untrue, the romancing of ingenious newspaper-correspondents; some of it, the lie that is half a truth.  For in these times there were not wanting parasites such as always prey upon creatures in disease, as well as weak admirers who misunderstood their hero’s natural character, and entirely failed to grasp his situation.

Let such troubles of the past be forgotten:  all that I now remember of many a weary night and day is the vision of a great soul in torment, and through purgatorial fires the ineffable tenderness of the real man emerging, with his passionate appeal to justice and baffled desire for truth.  To those who could not follow the wanderings of the wearied brain it was nothing but a horrible or a grotesque nightmare.  Some, in those trials, learnt as they could not otherwise have learnt to know him, and to love him as never before.