Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/56

 Puritan, because their stern morality was radically opposed to the æsthetic enjoyment to which he was most sensitive. He cared little for the æstheticism of a different and more sentimental type, which condemns as worldly the great passions and emotions which are the really moving forces of the world. He sympathises far too heartily with human loves and hatreds and political ambitions. But then he cannot, like Marlowe or Chapman, sympathise unequivocally with the heroic when it becomes excessive and over-strained. The power of humour keeps him from the bombastic and the affected, and he sees the facts of life too clearly not to be aware of the vanity of human wishes, the disappointments of successful ambition and the emptiness of its supposed rewards. He is profoundly conscious of the pettiness of human life and of the irony of fate—of which, indeed, he had plenty of instances before him. This, I fancy, implies personal characteristics which fall in very well, so far as they can be grasped, with what we know of the life. Be a Romeo while you can; love is delightful when you are young; only, think twice before you buy your dram of poison. As you grow older be a soldier, a hero, or a statesman, or, if you can be