His peculiar genius lay in discovery. He thought for himself, wrote a pure nervous English of his own, and even in the ordinary converse of life gave the impression of a being to whom everything was fresh and alive. His style was very characteristic of his vivid and elastic mind, ranging as it did from grave eloquence to colloquial fun, and using only the simplest vocabulary to produce its effects. Conscious theory or method of style he neither claimed nor cared to possess; he wrote as the spirit moved him, finding with astonishing ease the vestment most appropriate to his thought, and composing with such fluency that his manuscript went to press almost free of erasures. The literary and artistic conventions of the hour did not appeal to him. He never went to picture galleries; in later life he seldom read poetry, though as a boy he had been fond of it; and he would profess to be unable to distinguish a good sonnet when he saw one. Knowing the thing which he could do best, and judging that it was worthy of a life, he stripped himself of all superfluous tastes and inclinations that his whole time and strength might be dedicated to the work. Even music had to give way. And yet, though he laboured under the spur of a most exacting conscience and with every discouragement which illness and harrowing physical pain could oppose, it was with a certain blithe alacrity, as if work, however protracted and monotonous, was always a delightful pastime. He would sit in an armchair with a pipe in his mouth and some ponderous folio propped against his knees, steadily reading and smoking far into the night, thinking closely, taking no note, but apparently retaining everything. For a man who wrote and taught so much his knowledge was amazing both in range and accuracy; but his panoply might have been of gossamer so lightly did he bear it, and those who saw him a few times only may remember him chiefly for his irrepressible gift of humour, or for some external features, the fine steady brown eye, the rich flexible voice, the pale clear cut face seamed with innumerable lines, which lit up so quickly in the play of talk. Mr S. H. Butcher, who was in the same year at Cambridge and of the same college, has spoken the mind of those who knew him best. "When they think of him they recall, in the first instance, the delightful companion, the friend who had himself the genius of friendship. They think of his humour, overflowing from his talk and his speeches into what seems to many the driest regions of legal or antiquarian learning, and they recall his modesty, his quiet charm and his essential courtesy of soul[35]." And there was withal that high spiritual power of abnegation and of purpose in which the lover of hard won truth attains to his beatitude. _Res severa est verum gaudium._ FOOTNOTES: