Lord Wolseley was not prominent before the world as a man of letters, and I shall not pretend that he could claim that particular distinction, though he wrote easily and well. Of his best books I shall have something presently to say. But I think it is known to only a very few survivors that he had a predilection and even a passion for literature, which he shared, I should think, with no man of action of his time. He was an insatiate reader, and his reading covered a surprising range. For a man to whom life offered excitement and animation in almost every direction, it was notable how much time he found to spare for intellectual amusement. He attributed his love of reading to the influence of his Irish mother. He said once to me, "I would sooner live upon porridge in a bookroom than upon venison and truffles where books were not," and this meant much from one who was by no means indifferent to the truffles and the venison of life. The curious thing is that this obsession with literature nowhere peeps out in his published works, and is notably absent in his autobiography, _The Story of a Soldier's Life_, where we should particularly expect to find traces of it. For this defect in the general portraiture of that book there are reasons, upon which I may touch later on. It is a useful chain of military records, but it is a portrait of its author in full uniform, with cocked hat and sword. It was my good fortune to see him always in mufti, and if I essay a snapshot of him I am bound to show him with a book in his hand.