Such occupations as these, with magistrate’s work, and field sports taken in moderation, served to fill up his time, and would have satisfied most men situated as he was. But he could never in all these years get the notion quite out of his head (though it wore off later) that he was not doing his fair share of work in the world, and was a useless kind of personage, for whom no one was much the better but his wife and children, and whom nobody but they would miss. This feeling showed itself in his immense respect for those who were working in regular professions, and in the most conscientious scrupulousness about taking up their time. Often he has come to my chambers, and, after hurrying through some piece of family business, has insisted on going away directly, though I might not have seen him for a month, and was eager to talk on fifty subjects. The sight of open papers was enough for him; and he had not practised long enough to get the familiarity which breeds contempt, and to know how gladly the busiest lawyer puts aside an Abstract, or Interrogatories in Chancery, for the chance of a pleasant half-hour’s gossip. I think, however, that I can show you clearly enough, in a very few words, what his real work in the world was during these years, and how perfectly unconscious he was that he was doing it faithfully. In 1857, your grandfather had a dangerous attack of illness, from which he never recovered. George was with him and nursed him during the crisis. As soon as he was well enough to use a pen, he wrote as follows to Lady Salusbury:— “Amongst other things it occurs to me how much I have had to thank God for through life, and how my family have always drawn together in the way I wished them. And here I should be doing injustice to George, if I did not in my own mind trace much of this happy result to his quiet and imperceptible influence as an elder brother, in many ways of which my wife and I were not exactly cognizant at the time. Perhaps I am thinking more about him just now as he was in his natural place as my right-hand man when I was taken unwell; and when I say truly, that neither his mother or I ever had even an unkind word or disrespectful look from him since he was born, and that his constant study through life, as far as we are concerned, has been to spare us rather than give us trouble, and throw his own personal interests over much more than we chose to allow him, it is especially for the purpose of giving dear A—— (her adopted daughter) a precedent to quote with her own lips in the training of her own boys which I know will be particularly acceptable to herself. It is the last theme on which he would like to expatiate, but that such was my deliberate and true opinion, will be, I doubt not, one of these days, a source of satisfaction to them both, and to the children.”