MODERN EVOLUTION. 



171 



Life and Letters tells us that he was glad, after the 

 more serious work and correspondence of the day 

 were over, to listen to novels, for which he had a 

 great love so long as they ended happily, and con- 

 tained " some person whom one can thoroughly love, 

 if a pretty woman, so much the better." But 

 strangely enough, he lost all pleasure in music, art, 

 and poetry after thirty. When at school he enjoyed 

 Thomson, Byron, and Scott; Shelley gave him in- 

 tense delight, and he was fond of Shakespeare, 

 especially the historical plays; but in his old age 

 he found him " so intolerably dull that it nauseated 

 me." 



This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic 

 tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and 

 travels (independently of any scientific 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 collec- 

 tions 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 

 least once every week, for perhaps the parts of my brain now 

 atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The 

 loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be 

 injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral char- 

 acter, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. 



It is often said that a man's religion concerns 

 himself only. So far as the value of the majority 



