He was constantly—but, as I believe, quite unconsciously—giving offence to all sorts and conditions of men. His black beard, curly hair, gleaming teeth, and fierce grin, obtained for him an offensive sobriquet thus bestowed: One of his contributors sent him a letter resigning his position on the staff. He alleged but one reason for this course. It was: “I can no longer put up with the antics of a Barbary ape.” The eccentric recipient of the letter, instead of putting it into the fire and forgetting all about it, assembled the members of the staff, and read the document as though it proved the hopeless insanity of the writer. Having read it, he ran round the room, pretending to scratch his arms after the manner of a caged monkey, uttering the most comical squeals and chattering his teeth no end. He was drawn over the incident by Pottinger Stephens, who was running a weekly called _The Topical Times_. In that smart little journal a question was asked the following week in these words: “When did Mr. Bingham-Cox receive the degree of B.A.?” The unfortunate man did not see what lay under the inquiry. He wrote a letter on the note-paper of the Junior Athenæum—the “Junior Prigs,” as it used to be called—explaining that he had dispensed with the advantages of a University training, and that he was not a B.A. The letter appeared in Pot’s paper in due course; but with this heading: “_Mr. Bingham-Cox denies that he is a B.A._” The person of the newspaper proprietor was less sacrosanct in the jocund days than in these greyer times. Bingham-Cox was a collector in his way. He was very keen on engravings, and was by no means a bad judge. He started on his hobby long before the “engraving craze” set in, and his collection became worth four or five times the price he gave for it. The first-floor above the office was full of his samples from floor to ceiling. One day when I was looking over the gallery in his company, he invited me to select a couple of the engravings. I chose two—by no means the least valuable in the collection—and was about to ask when I might send for them, when he whipped out a notebook, and saying, “I’ll leave them to you in my will,” made an elaborate pretence of recording the incident. He was a collector of musical instruments, and had a piano or an American organ on every landing in the house. The most intolerable trials to which he subjected his friends were his recitals on one or other of these instruments. As he crashed out his Masses and fugues he rolled his head, showed his teeth, and grinned awfully, as though he thoroughly enjoyed witnessing the torture he inflicted.