perhaps one of my name passed along this road. Oh! for one hour of his joy as he spied his inn, or carved a cross in the church of St. John, or kissed the milkmaid at yonder gateway. Or would that I could taste his grief, even; his fresh and lively grief, I think, had something in it which my pale soul is sick for. For me the present is made of the future and the past. But he--perhaps--he could say, ‘Here am I with a can of mead and a fatigue that will do honour to my lavendered sheets; _Ave Maria!_ here’s to you all!’” Yet Philip’s mood was not seldom as clear and simple as that. At the inn--a classic inn to Oxford scholars--while the wind was purring in a yew tree, he put all his gloomier fancies in a tankard, where they were transmuted by a lambent ale and the “flaming ramparts” of that small world. The landlord was unloading a dray. As it is with men and clothes, remarked Philip, so with ale; the one grace of new ale is that it will one day be old. “May I,” he said, “in some world or another, be at least as old as this tankard, in the course of time: if I deserve it, as old as this inn: if I can, as old as these hills, with their whiskers of yew. Or, so long as I am not solitary, may I be as old as the sun, which alone of all visible things has obviously reached a fine old age!” He told me that his only valued dream was of an immemorial man, seated on a star near the zenith; and his beard’s point swept the hilltops, while with one hand he raised a goblet as large as the dome of the Radcliffe to his lips, and with the other stroked his beard and caused golden coins to flow in cascades into the countless hands of those underneath; and in a melodious bass he said continually, “It is well.” In his youth he had wedded Poverty, and when in the course of nature she forsook him, he gently transferred his heart to Humility, regretting only that he could no longer dress badly or make his own toast, without affectation. He would give a beggar a handful of tobacco, and ask sincerely, “Is it enough?” At the inn, he might have been lightly treated for the respect with which he shamed the most unhappy outcast, if he had not indifferently accepted the homage of the squire. “Which book of the _Æneid_,” said that magnate of fifteen stone, at seeing a Virgil in his hand, “do you like best?” “The sixth.” “And why?” “Because I have just read it over again.” “And which do you like next?” “The second, because I read it first, and loved it (I was twelve) better than anything but rackets.” So he turned to the five tramps, the first I ever saw leave their hats undoffed at his approach, who sat opposite.