Excerpt from Pugs and Peacocks<br><br>When undergraduates breakfasted with Melian they used to stagger away exhausted, though he never, except with a favoured pupil, touched on his own subject. But he treated everything as though it were his own subject; as though every thing were susceptible to the intellectual passion which he brought to bear on his own employment until he was concentrated into a bundle of white hot nerves. He had read everything that could be read with intelligence and, if he were capable of recreation, found it in the study of history, which, with him, was only another name for uni versal knowledge: Kulturgeschichte. Deploring the lack of precision of the English language, he never hesitated in any company to use German, or French, or Italian, or Hindu, or Chinese. People laughed when he did that, because he had a reputation for wit, which he deplored. His jokes were only statements of the obvious five or ten seconds before others were capable of perceiving it.<br><br>He was the last man in whom a worldly eye would have seen a hero of romance, but then a worldly eye sees nothing of the force and the courage that go to the making of any concentrated effort, for a worldly eye sees only financial and social results and is always mistaken. It is unlikely, indeed, that when this story is told, those who have that kind of eye will see more in it than the fact that one more weakling has fallen out of the race and made a fool of himself.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.