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56 what he saw: now the smallest of human motives are what lie on the surface. It encourages us to be thought a little better than what we are; but Sir Robert's system made no allowances,—it took a low view of the intellectual world, but a still lower of the moral. There was no excitement, no belief, no generous impulse about it. He would have erected no glorious monument to the past, to serve as oracle and incentive to the future. We can imagine his enjoying the pointed and polished satire of Pope; though we can also imagine him saying, "Of what use is it to tell men of their faults, they never mend them?" But how impossible it would be to suppose him entering, for one instant, into the wide and benevolent philosophy of Wordsworth, a philosophy founded on belief in good. Yet the actual never quite suffices to the mind; and even with the shrewd, the practical Sir Robert, the imagination opened one sunny vista, in which he saw visions and dreamed dreams. To know what passed through his mind, what train of thoughts were conjured up