240 LIFE OF SIR JOHN LUBBOCK oh. 



love and interest ; but he was little attracted, 

 as I think, by the beauties of art. He might give 

 it the careless appreciation of one naturally 

 perceptive of fine colour and form, but he paid it 

 no study : I had almost said that he wasted no 

 time on it. I do not know, indeed, that in his 

 case this might not be said with perfect truth, 

 for surely it could only have been a cause of 

 regret and of loss to his work in the world, had 

 he made any further division of his talents. As 

 it was, it appears that he practised a very wise 

 economy in diverting his attention to none of the 

 modes of art. Music only attracted him in its 

 simplest forms, and even the forms of beauty in 

 literature, so far as they are concerned with the 

 expression only and not with the thing expressed, 

 stirred little response in him. It is of a piece 

 with that indifference to the classics which his 

 tutor had bewailed at Eton. Amidst the lamenta- 

 tions the good man had struck the note of hope 

 that the boy might become " a sounder scholar." 

 Vain hope that was never realised ! It is ques- 

 tionable whether pure scholarship could ever 

 have taken real hold on a mind so constituted and 

 so preoccupied with the more practical subjects 

 of knowledge : in the circumstances among 

 which his further development took place, it 

 was impossible that he should fall under that 

 particular kind of intellectual charm. Meta- 

 physical philosophy had equally little attraction 

 for him. 



Leaving Eton as he did at such an early age 

 and going straight into the City, he had none of 

 the years of comparative leisure which are almost 



