Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/114

 giving a more assured message, made him a delightful companion. And a delightful companion he is, too, in his books, with their sub-acid egotisms, their easy flow of keen-sighted analysis; their sympathy with the ideal, and, above all, that determination to see things as in themselves they really are, which gives the virile strength that would otherwise be wanting. His books and he have done their work so well that they can never appeal to any later age with so much force as they have to this. But because they have had so direct an appeal to this, they must live as typical of our age and representative of it.