VI.] Chauncey Wright. 107 



plain to the least cultivated intelligence. This kind 

 of patient interest, joined with his sweetness of dis- 

 position and winning simplicity of manner, made him 

 a great favourite with children. He would amuse and 

 instruct them by the hour together with games and 

 stories and conjuror's tricks, in which he had acquired 

 no mean proficiency. 



Along with this absence of emotional excitability, 

 Mr. Wright was characterised by the absence of 

 aesthetic impulses or needs. He was utterly insen- 

 sible to music, and but slightly affected by artistic 

 beauty of any sort. Excepting his own Sokratic 

 presence, there never was anything attractive about 

 his room, or indeed anything to give it an individual 

 character. In romance, too, he was equally deficient : 

 after his first and only journey to Europe, I observed 

 that he recalled sundry historic streets of London and 

 Paris only as spots where some happy generalisation 

 had occurred to him. 



• But romantic sentiment, aesthetic sensitiveness, and 

 passionate emotion, — these are among the things 

 which hinder most of us from resting content with 

 a philosophy which applies the law of parsimony so 

 rigorously as to cut away everything except the 

 actuality of observed phenomena. In his freedom 



