MENTAL QUALITIES. 



101 



lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably 

 dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my 

 taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me 

 thinking too energetically on what I have been at 

 work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain 

 some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me 

 the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the 

 other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, 

 though not of a very high order, have been for years 

 a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often 

 bless all novelists. A surprising number have been 

 read aloud to me, arid I like all if moderately good, 

 and if they do not end unhappily against which a 

 law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my 

 taste, does not come into the first class unless it con- 

 tains some person whom one can thoroughly love, 

 and if a pretty woman all the better. 



This curious and lamentable loss of the higher 

 aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, 

 biographies, and travels (independently of any scien- 

 tific facts which they may contain), and essays on all 

 sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. 

 My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for 

 grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, 

 but why this should have caused the atrophy of that 

 part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes 

 depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind 

 more highly organised or better constituted than 

 mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered ; and 

 if I had to live my life again, I would have made a 

 rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at 



