200 MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN 



like a call to battle. He loved courage, enter- 

 prise, brave natures, a brave word, an ugly virtue ; 

 everything that lifts us above the table where we 

 eat or the bed we sleep upon. This with no touch 

 of the motive-monger or the ascetic. He loved 

 his virtues to be practical, his heroes to be great 

 eaters of beef ; he loved the jovial Heracles, loved 

 the astute Odysseus ; not the Robespierres and 

 Wesleys. A fine buoyant sense of life and of 

 man's unequal character ran through all his 

 thoughts. He could not tolerate the spirit of the 

 pickthank ; being what we are, he wished us to 

 see others with a generous eye of admiration, 

 not with the smallness of the seeker after faults. 

 If there shone anywhere a virtue, no matter how 

 incongruously set, it was upon the virtue we 

 must fix our eyes. I remember having found 

 much entertainment in Voltaire's Saiil, and telling 

 him what seemed to me the drollest touches. He 

 heard me out, as usual when displeased, and 

 then opened fire on me with red-hot shot. To 

 belittle a noble story was easy ; it was not litera- 

 ture, it was not art, it was not morality ; there 

 was no sustenance in such a form of jesting, there 

 was (in his favourite phrase) ' no nitrogenous food ' 

 in such literature. And then he proceeded to 

 show what a fine fellow David was ; and what 

 a hard knot he was in about Bathsheba, so that 

 (the initial wrong committed) honour might well 



