But the outstanding figure of the Shelley Society was that of its founder, Dr. F. J. Furnivall, the veteran scholar and sculler, a grand old man whose unflagging ardour in his favourite pursuits might have shamed many enthusiasts who were his juniors by half a century. A born fighter, the vehemence of his disputes with certain men of letters (Swinburne, for example), was notorious; but personally he was kindness itself, and I have most pleasant recollections of the many visits which I paid him in his house near Primrose Hill, where, sitting in a big arm-chair, he would talk eagerly, as he took tea, over the men he had known or the Societies he had founded. His tea-tray used to be placed on a sort of small bridge which rested on the arms of the chair, and in his excitement over a thrilling anecdote, I have seen him forget that he was thus restricted, and springing forward send tray and tea flying together across the room. He once told me that, for hygienic reasons, he had been a vegetarian for twenty years, and had done the hardest work of his life without flesh-food: then, happening to be confined to the house with sprained ankles, he got out of health by neglecting to reduce his daily diet. Just at that moment a friend sent him a turkey, and he said to himself: “Now, why should this fine bird be wasted, owing to a mere whim of mine?” Thus had he relapsed into cannibalism as lightly as he relinquished it. There was an innocence and _naïveté_ about Furnivall which at times was almost boyish; his impetuosity and total lack of discretion made him insensible to other persons’ feelings, so that he gave direful offence, and trod on the toes of many good people, without being in the least conscious of it. He ruined the Browning Society, of which he was both founder and _con_founder, by an ill-advised speech about Jesus Christ, in a discussion on “Christmas Eve and Easter Day”; and in like manner, though with less serious results, he startled his Shelleyan friends, when Prometheus was the subject of debate, by asking in tones of impatience: “_Why_ did the fellow allow himself to be chained to the rock? _Why_ didn’t he show fight, as I should have done?” And certainly, when one thinks of it, there would have been trouble in the Caucasus, if Dr. Furnivall had been bidden to play the martyr’s part.