In matters of courtesy he was old-fashioned and punctilious. To the last he resented that grotesque disfigurement which was beginning to make manners ugly before he died. Even at an earlier date, “Manners are easy,” said “Coningsby,” “and life is hard.” “And I wish to see things exactly the reverse,” said “Lord Henry,” “the modes of subsistence less difficult, the conduct of life more ceremonious.” In his fiction it was often objected that he over-depicted great splendour and supreme beauty; that it was thronged with “daughters” and mansions “of the gods.” But, if he erred in these respects, it was from familiarity and not from ostentation, as Lady John Manners has pointed out at some length. “It must be recollected,” she wrote, thinking of _Lothair_, “that many of those who most appreciated him, and whose friendship he warmly reciprocated, are surrounded in daily life by a certain amount of state which employs their dependants.” So, too, with regard to the peaceful and prosperous marriages of those homes of forty years ago on which he delighted to dwell. He loved the gentle Buckinghamshire landscape, with its treasures of association in every cranny, more than all the remembered luxuriance of the South and glare of the East. And it should also be remembered that his works abound in sympathetic descriptions of all kinds and conditions of men, including the strangest and humblest. They were taken from personal observation, and he himself would penetrate the queerest haunts to gain the most curious insight. The common and the uncommon people fascinated him, for in them he found ideas; the middling charmed him less. He delighted to invest the seemingly commonplace with significance, and also to strip the pretentiously important of its wonder. Not even Dickens, as I shall hint hereafter, knew or loved his London better. I shall also, in the proper place, touch on the exotic element in his style and accent. Mr. John Morley has aptly compared it to Goethe’s dictum about St. Peter’s, that, though it is _baroque_; it is always the expression of something great and not merely grandiose. His big words are never for little things. Undoubtedly some of his earliest works are deficient in taste; and there is a certain fierce hardness in their abrupt violence. Mrs. Austin advised him in omissions from the original manuscript of _Vivian Grey_; it was to women that he owed his training in these directions. His knowledge was vast and profound, and he exercised the habit of pursuing long trains of thought in reflection. He seldom worked at night, preferring that season for brooding over his ideas. But at all times, contrary to the superficial opinion, he worked long and hard, sometimes over ten hours a day. His gift of divination never dimmed his passion for study, until old age and ill-health warned him that it must pause. He never ceased to deplore the want of “that boundless leisure which we literary men need.” To the last, as Lord