The biography of Mr. Brooke, which his son-in-law, Principal Jacks, has just brought out, will, I think, reveal to many what made the spell of Stopford Brooke, to a degree which is not common in biography. For _le papier est bête_!--and the charm of a man who was both poet and artist, without writing poems or painting pictures, is very hard to hand on to those who never knew him. But, luckily, Stopford Brooke's diaries and letters reflect him with great fullness and freedom. They have his faults, naturally. They are often exuberant or hasty--not, by any means, always fair to men and women of a different temperament from his own. Yet, on the whole, there is the same practical, warm-hearted wisdom in them that many a friend found in the man himself when they went to consult him in his little study at the back of Bedford Chapel, where he wrote his sermons and books, and found quiet, without, however, barring out the world, if it wanted him. And there breathes from them also the enduring, eager passion for natural and artistic beauty which made the joy of his own life, and which his letters and journals may well kindle in others. His old age was a triumph in the most difficult of arts. He was young to the end, and every day of the last waiting years was happy for himself, and precious to those about him. He knew what to give up and what to keep, and his freshness of feeling never failed. Perhaps his best and most enduring memorial will be the Wordsworth Cottage at Grasmere, which he planned and carried out. And I like to remember that my last sight of him was at a spot only a stone's-throw from that cottage on the Keswick Road, his gray hair beaten back by the light breeze coming from the pass, and his cheerful eyes, full often, as it seemed to me, of a mystical content, raised toward the evening glow over Helm Crag and the Easedale fells.