As to his so-called gruffness of manner, I will speak about that later on, but I want at once to make clear a certain quality of mind which I believe helped things, so that he was not troubled by the presence of a stranger, either then or when [Greek: D] was no longer a stranger, ever afterwards. I suppose if there had been any occasion for comparing notes he might have discovered much to object to in my attitude to the universe, especially during my turbulent youth, but we had much in common, he in his great grand way illimitably, and I in my tentative fashion diminutively. The quality I refer to as a bond was a heartfelt detestation on [Greek: D]'s part of what I venture to call the pseudo-biographic mania. The notion of collecting tiny pinhead facts, or words actually spoken but separated from their context: the idea of collecting these and calling the result biography I loathed. So when I found, as I did at once, that the great man, the poet, and the equally great woman his wife, held similar views, I applauded myself and became more and more rigidly unbiographic. Of course, I see now that [Greek: D] was possibly over-scrupulous. Instead of depending on mere recollection, how much more sensible, and not a whit the less reverential, it would have been to have taken down at many a conversation some catchword of what he said, and his remarks were apt to be as incisive as they were laconic. And the Poet's fore-ordained biographer would have blessed the inspiration. Would Tennyson himself have been equally pleased? I am not so sure. But what he really deprecated was after all only the vulgar tales of the spurious biographer. "In life the owls--at death the ghouls." With this apology I come to some among the dicta current in my time. I think it was the first night I happened to use the word "knowledge," pronouncing it as I had been brought up to do with the ō long, whereupon he complimented me.[51] "You say 'knōwledge,'" and explained that "knŏwledge" to rhyme with "college" was the only permissible exception. I felt pleased with my domestic training. Then he went on to denounce a solecism, the use of "like" with a verb, "like he did," instead of "as he did," and humorously he begged me to correct any one guilty of such barbarism, a pledge I undertook, and acted up to, correcting speakers right and left till it came to the superior clergy, bishops, and so forth, in the pulpit; then I desisted....