to do good.”  And this redoubled effort was in his case all of a piece with what had gone before.  In 1863 he wrote to a friend:  “In trying to heal the British demoniac, true doctrine is not enough; one must convey the true doctrine with studied moderation; for, if one commits the least extravagance, the poor madman seizes hold of this, tears and rends it, and quite fails to perceive that you have said anything else.”

All his literary life was spent in trying to convey “true doctrine with studied moderation.”  And in his true doctrine nothing was more conspicuous than his insistence, early and late, on the supreme importance of character and conduct.  The first object of life was to realize one’s best self, and this endeavour required not merely cleverness or information:  even genius would not of itself suffice; still less would adherence to any particular body of opinions.  If a man was dis-respectable, “not even the merit of not being a Philistine could make up for it.”  Character issuing in Conduct—­this was the true culture which we must all ensue, if by any means we were to attain to our predestined perfection; and, if that were once secured, all the rest—­talent, fame, influence, length of days, worldly prosperity—­mattered little.  Thus he wrote of his friend Edward Quillinan—­

    I saw him sensitive in frame,
      I knew his spirits low: 
    And wish’d him health, success, and fame—­
      I do not wish it now.

    For these are all their own reward,
      And leave no good behind;
    They try us, oftenest make us hard,
      Less modest, pure, and kind.

    Alas! yet to the suffering man,
      In this his mortal state,
    Friends could not give what fortune can—­
      Health, ease, a heart elate.

    But he is now by fortune foil’d
      No more; and we retain
    The memory of a man unspoil’d,
      Sweet, generous, and humane—­

    With all the fortunate have not,
      With gentle voice and brow. 
    —­Alive, we would have changed his lot,
      We would not change it now.

When his eldest boy died he wrote to a friend:  “He is gone—­and all the absorption in one’s own occupations which prevented one giving to him more than moments, all one’s occasional impatience, all one’s taking his ailments as a matter of course, come back upon one as something inconceivable and inhuman.  And his mother, who has nothing of all this to reproach herself with, who was everything to him and would have given herself for him, has lost the occupation of sixteen years, and has to begin life over again.  The one endless comfort to us is the thought of the sweet, firm, sterling character which the darling child developed in and by all his sufferings and privations.  Of that we can think and think.”

When his second boy died he said that his “deepest feeling” was best expressed by his own Dejaneira—­