Sir Alfred Wills, Mr. Winterbotham, Sir Edward Fry, Mr. William de Morgan, and others, to whose kindness I am indebted for many reminiscences of Professor Newman as a teacher, tell me that he had many eccentricities which perpetually aroused their sense of humour. Sir Edward Fry tells me that his manner, when he himself was at college in 1848, was "somewhat nervous, perhaps even a little irritable, and he was not exactly popular as a professor. But his lectures were very interesting and stimulating." He adds that he was "a very brilliant scholar, with a tendency towards eccentricity." This eccentricity showed itself in various forms, but one very noticeable one was that of dress. I am told by a friend that he often dressed in the onion fashion--three coats one over the other, and the last one--green! That he often wore trousers edged with a few inches of leather, and that his hats were not immaculate. Well, perhaps it has never been quite understood from what part of old and unfashionable attire the Spirit of Humour winks at one with such twinkling fun in the corner of its eye that laughter is irresistible. But none the less, few there are of us who have not--though it may be against our steadier and wiser judgment--at some time or other caught sight of that wink, and laughed spontaneously. To everyone who saw it, when the relics were collected and placed in his old house in Cheyne Row, Carlyle's old 'top' hat was irresistibly funny. Nothing loses caste more completely than a top hat when it is behind the time, and the shine is off the silk. Sir Alfred Wills mentions, in the reminiscences which follow, which he has kindly sent me, that at one time Newman "took to walking from his house" (in town) "to the college and back in cap and gown." This, however, was not such a startling vagary of costume in a London street as was that of a certain professor of my acquaintance, very absent-minded and dreamy, who, intent on making some abstruse point clear to a young lady pupil, walked one evening round and round a London square with her, talking earnestly, and attired in his top hat and dressing-gown! As regards Newman's teaching of Latin, Sir Alfred Wills says that "much the best thing that" he "got from" him "was the practice in writing" it. He tells us that his lectures showed signs of the most profound research, and that he took untiring trouble in explaining any difficulty which had arisen. If the difficulty had been that of some member of one of his classes, he would not keep the whole class waiting while he went over the difficult part of the lesson again, but he would approach the subject from an altogether different point of view, and throw, for the class _in toto_, a new light upon it.