His literary interest became increasingly centred on records of the lives of men and women; especially of such men and women as he had known; he was generally curious to see the newly published biographies, though often disappointed by them. He would also read, even for his amusement, good works of French or Italian fiction. His allegiance to Balzac remained unshaken, though he was conscious of lengthiness when he read him aloud. This author's deep and hence often poetic realism was, I believe, bound up with his own earliest aspirations towards dramatic art. His manner of reading aloud a story which he already knew was the counterpart of his own method of construction. He would claim his listener's attention for any apparently unimportant fact which had a part to play in it: he would say: 'Listen to this description: it will be important. Observe this character: you will see a great deal more of him or her.' We know that in his own work nothing was thrown away; no note was struck which did not add its vibration to the general utterance of the poem; and his habitual generosity towards a fellow-worker prompted him to seek and recognize the same quality, even in productions where it was less conspicuous than in his own. The patient reading which he required for himself was justified by that which he always demanded for others; and he claimed it less in his own case for his possible intricacies of thought or style, than for that compactness of living structure in which every detail or group of details was essential to the whole, and in a certain sense contained it. He read few things with so much pleasure as an occasional chapter in the Old Testament.