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STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER

the proper theory of sham ruins. They ought, he thinks, to represent the real thing, and should not be made into mere places for tea-drinking. Whatever may be Young's limitations, however, it is impossible to doubt that his enthusiasm for the beauties of nature is as hearty and genuine as that of Gray or of any of the generation which learned its canons of taste from Wordsworth. At Killarney, for example, he is thrown into raptures of the most orthodox variety, and when he comes within sight of the Pyrenees Mr. Ruskin himself could not accuse him of deficient feeling. 'This prospect' (from Montauban), he says, 'which contains a semicircle of a hundred miles in diameter, has an oceanic vastness in which the eye loses itself; an almost boundless scene of cultivation; an animated, but confused, mass of infinitely varied parts, melting gradually into the distant obscure, from which emerges the amazing frame of the Pyrenees, rearing their silvered heads far above the clouds.' Young, one cannot doubt after reading this and other passages, would have been in these days an honorary member of the Alpine Club, as well as of his numerous foreign agricultural societies.

There is, indeed, one exception to his enthu-