It was in his editorial capacity that I, who write these lines, first knew him in 1866, though I did not make his personal acquaintance till 1877, when he was a few months over 63. I found him a tall, stout, and--though not strictly handsome--a good-looking man, who might very well have passed for ten years younger than he actually was, and whose burly figure might have seemed more at home in the covers or the turnip-fields than in the Privy Council Office; his weight, which cannot, even then, have been much under eighteen stone, must have stopped his hunting some time before. But in his manner there was no trace of this fancied rusticity--how could there be, indeed, in one trained in society almost from the cradle?--and his voice was soft and musical. I have seen it stated that he was pompous, self-assertive, and dictatorial. That his manners, formed by his mother and his aunt on eighteenth-century models, and perfected in Paris among the traditions of the _ancien regime_, had about them nothing of the 'hail fellow, well met' fashion of the present day is very certain, and, joined to his height (about 6 ft. 1 in.) and his great bulk, may sometimes have given him the appearance of speaking _de haut en bas_, and must, unquestionably, have enabled him to repress any unwelcome or undue familiarity. As an editor, of course, he was dictatorial. We may talk of the Republic of Letters; but in point of fact a successful journal is and must be an autocracy. In his private capacity, I never found in his conversation that habit of 'laying down the law' which some, with probably inferior opportunities of judging, have complained of. Of his untiring application and power of work enough has already been said; but the uniform good luck which attended him through life is worthy of notice. In the course of eighty-two years he experienced no reverse of fortune, no great disappointment, and--with the one, though terrible, exception of the death of his first wife--no great sorrow beyond what is the lot of all men. We know that fortune favours the brave. It favours also those who to ability and temper join prudence, courtesy, and careful, systematic, painstaking industry. At the age of 82 Reeve had outlived all of his contemporaries--the men who had associated with him and worked with him in his youth. Their opinion of him is only to be gauged by the fact that, with but few and easily explained exceptions, the friendships of his early manhood were broken only by the grave. The number of friends of forty or fifty years' standing who died during the last decade of his life is very remarkable. As these are wanting, I am happy in being able to conclude this tribute to his memory by two appreciations, one English, the other French; the first, from and representing the 'Edinburgh Review' to which it was contributed in January 1896, by Mr. W. E. H. Lecky.