sacredness of duty, I have had no use for the metaphysician. I
haven't the remotest notion what his jargon means. From Aristotle
to William James, I have dipped into quite a lot of them--
Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Schopenhauer (the thrice besotted
Teutonic ass who said that women weren't beautiful), for I hate to
be thought an ignorant duffer--and I have never come across in
them anything worth knowing, thinking, or doing that I was not
taught at my mother's knee. And as for her, dear, simple soul, if
you had asked her what was the Categorical Imperative (having
explained beforehand the meaning of the words), she would have
said, "The Sermon on the Mount."

Of course, please regard this as a criticism not of the
metaphysicians and the philosophers, but of myself. All these
great thinkers have their niches in the Temple of Fame, and I'm
quite aware that the consensus of human judgment does not
immortalise even such an ass as Schopenhauer, without sufficient
reason. All I want to convey to you is that I am only a plain,
ordinary God-fearing, law-abiding Englishman, and that when young
Randall Holmes brought down from Oxford all sorts of highfalutin
theories about everything, not only in God's Universe, but in the
super-Universe that wasn't God's, and of every one of which he was
cocksure, I found my homely self very considerably out of it.

Then--young Randall was a poet. He had won the Newdigate. The
subject was Andrea del Sarto, one of my favourite painters--il
pittore senza errore--and his prize poem--it had, of course, to be
academic in form--was excellent. It said just the things about him
which Browning somehow missed, and which I had always been
impotently wanting to say. And a year or so afterwards--when I