A pipe and an occasional glass served Wimpenny-Brown as a tribute to the bohemianism of his profession; as hostages to respectability he had a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses at the end of a black ribbon, trim whiskers, and a large umbrella; with his staff he was--I believe--majestically paternal, but to his opponents he was a very Jupiter; and for the rest--he had a manner. In his presence, it seemed as if the _Essay on Liberty_ had just been published, as if dusty men of letters were still delightedly wondering where Macaulay’s style came from, as if radical masterpieces were still being issued in fortnightly parts. Many men had his respect, even his homage, but as an editor--and I never knew him as anything else--he would allow no man to dictate to him; he served only the Public and ‘those few great principles.’ ‘An editor,’ he would say, tapping a sheet of paper with his glasses, ‘is the servant of the Public although his duty is to educate it.’ And his innocent vanity would swell out into such monstrous proportions, would bud and blossom into such foolish phrases, that his hearer would wonder if he had suddenly strayed into the rigid world of the third-rate comic novel. But all was sincerely spoken. Wimpenny-Brown meant all that he said, and he strove hard to educate his public. He would not pander to low tastes (he has said so many a time in my hearing); nor was he prepared to tickle rather higher tastes with the bright confectionery of fiction and verse and such things. No, it was by enunciating and applying those great principles, giving solid bread, so to speak, that he meant to educate his readers. ‘You must remember, sir’--he would point the glasses--‘that this is a News-Paper, and not a magazine’--the last with magnificent scorn. At ordinary times, his hand was hardly to be traced in the paper; he remained hidden afar-off, brooding over the great principles. But at a crisis, Wallerdale knew what it meant to have a _Herald_ and a Wimpenny-Brown as its editor. On the eve of an election, at the outbreak or at the conclusion of a war, at all times like these, he could be counted upon; leaders would flow from his pen, and the _Herald_ would look Monarch, Lords, Commons, in the face, would address all Europe, and the two Americas if need be, re-assuring friends and denouncing enemies here, there, and everywhere. Opinion would perhaps differ as to when he was at his best, but I, for one, found most to admire in his leaders on the death--say--of a political opponent: the decent respect for the dead man’s private virtues, tempered by regret at the waste of brilliant qualities in a bad cause, at the ‘late lamented minister’s fatal inability to comprehend those great principles which have ...’ and so forth. One saw the gold-rimmed glasses and the trim whiskers poised over the foolscap; he was no longer a fellow-citizen but the supreme arbiter, measuring out praise and blame while the organ wails and the strange dust is borne away.