We have tried to eliminate what we believe to have been the real Milnes from a cloud of misrepresentations and erroneous judgments—for both of which, it must be remembered, he was himself directly responsible. We leave to our readers the task of passing sentence on a singularly amiable, if eccentric, personality. Some opinions expressed by those who understood him and valued him will appropriately close this article. When he was young his friends recognized in him what Dr Johnson would have called the potentiality of greatness, though they doubted whether he would have sufficient steadiness of purpose to achieve it. ‘Your gay and airy mind,’ wrote Tennyson in 1833, ‘must have caught as many colours from the landscape you moved through as a flying soap-bubble—a comparison truly somewhat irreverent, yet I meant it not as such.’ ‘I think you are near something very glorious,’ said Stafford O’Brien, ‘but you will never reach it.’ Mr Aubrey de Vere decided that ‘he had not much solid ambition. The highlands of life were not what interested him much; its mountains cast their shadows too far and drew down too many clouds.’ But, if Milnes’s well-wishers were compelled to abandon their hopes of any great distinction for their friend, they recognized, with one accord, his charity and his sincerity. If they did not admire him, they loved him. ‘You are on the whole a good man,’ said Carlyle, ‘though with terrible perversities.’ Forster declared that he himself had ‘many friends who would be kind to him in distress, but only one who would be equally kind to him in disgrace.’ A distinguished German said of him, ‘Is it possible that an Englishman can be so loveable?’ and Mr Sumner described him as ‘a member of Parliament, a poet and a man of fashion, a Tory who does not forget the people, and a man of fashion with sensibilities, love of virtue and merit among the simple, the poor, and the lowly.’ Lastly, let us cite his own whimsical character of himself, which, though expressed in the language of paradox, is probably, in the main, nearer to the truth than one drawn by any critic could be: ‘He was a man of no common imaginative perceptions, who never gave his full conviction to anything but the closest reasoning; of acute sensibilities, who always distrusted the affections; of ideal aspirations and sensual habits; of the most cheerful manners and of the gloomiest philosophy. He hoped little and believed little, but he rarely despaired, and never valued unbelief, except as leading to some larger truth and purer conviction’ (vol. ii. p. 491). EDWARD HENRY PALMER[88].