Oliver did not himself possess genius, yet he had some of its wide sympathies, keen intuitions and susceptibilities, and strong beliefs. Had the less gifted man known the greater Oliver would have prized highly the manly self-respect and modesty, even the odd gruff bearing, which was only the prickly husk to the sweet kernel with its milk of human kindness and juice of a fine, genial humour, which no general misconception, no bitter adversity, could sour. Oliver would have gone a pilgrimage—for he, too, had his boundless enthusiasm—to that obscure little northern bakehouse, where an intellectual and moral giant toiled single-handed and fared frugally amidst his inspired drawings of cherubim and seraphim, ape and Greek boy. Oliver Constable could not have pretended to match his brother-tradesman’s profound, patient studies in natural science, or the royal bounty which disposed of the geological and botanical specimens—so painfully, and yet with such deep satisfaction and noble exultation, chiselled from the rock and plucked from the moor. After they had been laboriously and lovingly assorted and preserved, these specimens, together with the deductions carefully and warily drawn from them, were lavished with princely liberality on men of science, for whom they might win name and fame, while the real conqueror of the spoils was content to remain ‘Dick the Baker,’ drudging at a trade which was unremunerative to him, unknown and unhonoured, so far as the mere tinsel of worldly distinction and applause was concerned. And through it all Dick, who was the reverse of a morbid, fantastic misanthropist, would have preferred a certain amount of material prosperity to the slow poverty which ground him to death at last, with the honest human fear of debt and starvation. He would have liked in his early manhood to have met with such a degree of comprehension and fellow-feeling from his neighbours as might have saved him from being quickly driven back on his natural reserve, with his huge stores of kindliness, cheeriness, and wit, confined to the kindred at a distance from him, his one or two rarely endowed, occasional cronies, his simple old housekeeper, the young students who were welcome to his priceless instructions without a thought of a professor’s fee. But in the man’s lofty soul and poetic idealisation, which could exist along with exact knowledge, he was content, with something like scorn of being pointed out for any other distinction, to be known only—apart from a queer fish, and a half-cracked dour sinner—for what he still was, without prejudice or false shame, ‘Dick the Baker.’