To a scholar Greek particles may serve as the fittest test of virtue; this glorious pedant has postponed life and the enjoyments of life to future cycles of existence; here on earth he expends a desperate passion--upon what?
Upon the dryasdust intricacies of grammar; and it is not as though he had already attained; he only desperately follows after: That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it: This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it.
But again the grammarian, like the painter, does not strive after a vague, transcendental ideal; he is not as one that beateth the air; his quest for knowledge is definite and positive enough; he throws all care for infinite things, except the infinite of philological accuracy, upon God; and the viaticum of his last moments is one more point of grammar.
Two of the poems of _Men and Women_ are pages tragic-grotesque and pathetic-grotesque from the history of religion.

In _The Heretic s Tragedy_ John, Master of the Temple, burns alive in Paris square for his sins against the faith and Holy Church; the glow of the blazing larch and pine almost reaches the reader of the stanzas; the great petals of this red rose of flame bend towards him; the gust of sulphur offends his nostrils.

And the rage of piety is hotter than the fire; it is a mingled passion, compounded of delight in the fierce spectacle, a thrilling ecstacy at the sight of a fellow-creature tortured, the self-complacency of conscious orthodoxy, and the horrible zeal of the Lord's house.

Yet though the event is sung by one of the rejoicing orthodox, somehow we are made to feel that when John the apostate, bound in the flames and gagged, prays to Jesus Christ to save him, that prayer may have been answered.

This passage from the story of the age of faith was not selected with a view to please the mediaeval revivalists of the nineteenth century, but in truth its chief value is not theological or historical but artistic.