APPENDIX 629

to make all honestly living creatures happy-even at some inconvenience to myself.

Lastly, but perhaps, practically, of all the chief characteristics legible of me, is an instinct for Teaching which resolves itself, as far as I can make out the thing under my own microscope, partly into an extreme dislike of folly absolute, and for the rest, into an almost inexplicable but strongly instinctive pleasure in the filling of empty heads and hearts, as if they were so many bottles, like to be broken for having nothing inside, or cells of honeycomb too hollowly fragile. And under the growling of this indignation at public folly and the minor buzzing and murmuring of the hymenopterous instinct for pouring good conserve of eternal fact, sweet in the taste and nourishing in the substance, into every cell of human soul that will let it in, I have gone on throughout my life, printing everything I could discover of such fact as fast as I could, and snarling at foolish things and people as hard as I could; but often with no more sense of duty than the tide has in filling sandpits, or a stone in rolling down hill.

These four main characters of me, then, are, as I have said, legible enough, in my constant work. The tendency to moralise or sermonise- involved on one side with the common vanity of a clerk, and on the other with more or less right religious sentiment-I do not here think it proper, or needful, to discuss.

But whatever belongs to it, or has been dictated by it, may perfectly well by any reader whom it offends be skipped, or denied: the practical substance of my books, if he knows how to read, will remain for him exactly the same.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]