another discipline. He must tread the winding road, the road of other
men. His trial will be a sharp one; through many paths he will have
to be taught the truth. I could hardly bear it, when I look at the
tender face, the dreamy eyes, and feel his caressing hand, thinking
of the horrors he must look upon, if I did not know that all will be
well.

"Will you undertake a charge for me? I could not play a part in the
world again, even if I would. I have lost my hold on men. I do not
realize what are their hopes and fears, their ideals, and most of
all, their whims and caprices; and, what is more, I could never
appreciate them now. Ten years' isolation is enough to spoil one for
that; in ten years many social traditions and commonplaces of life
have changed. I should have to ask the reasons for many things. I
should never feel them instinctively, as those do who have grown old
along with them.

"And so I can not undertake the task of guiding him in this harsh
world that he must enter. I have known, however, for some time that
it would be undertaken and accomplished for me. You have been sent to
me, later than I thought, but still sent. I have been waiting; I have
been true to my creed, and have not been impatient.

"I intrust him to you as I intrust the fairest possession I have,
knowing that you will feel the responsibility. You will find him
passionately affectionate, and in danger there; quick to anger, and
in danger there; personally fascinating and beautiful, and in danger
there; and in these three things his trial will be. But he does not
resent nor brood; he is docile, apt to listen, eager to comprehend;
and he is truthful and sincere."

I have given this in a continuous speech, much as Arthur told it me
a few months ago, though it was the essence of a conversation. The
quiet man, with his dreamy eyes fixed on his face, he told me, and
the fragrant Eastern garden seemed from moment to moment of the
strange adventure to swim and become vague and phantasmal; but again
the quiet air of certainty with which questions were asked and
statements made gave him a curious sense of security, and an impulse
to accept the indicated path, together with a sense of shrinking from
such a responsibility.

"I do not, as I told you," said the other, "want your answer now, but
this day one year hence, August 19, 1879, I shall claim it. And I
have no doubt," he added with a smile, "of what that answer will be.
But I beg of you do not give the question a hasty consideration and
then reverse your decision. Do not attempt to decide. Let your choice
be guided by circumstances; they are the safest guide, for they are
not of our own making.

"I do not suppose," he continued, "that I shall ever see you again on
earth, as you proceed with your journey to-morrow; and indeed I think
it will perhaps be as well that this should be our last conversation,
so that nothing else should interfere to blur the impression.

"One last word then." He paused for a moment, and the stillness was
broken only by the faintest stir of odorous wind among the
spice-trees and a waft of distant evening noises.

"You are treading a path, though you do not realize it, which it is
not given to many men to tread. You have had your first intimation of
the goal to-day, and the future will not be wanting in indications of
the same; but, as I have said, you will suddenly, when you least
expect it, step inside the circle, and everything will be changed.

"To you I wish to intrust a future that I can not mould myself, to be
moulded, not for me, but for the great Master of all. You are the
chosen instrument for this. My work lies in another region, which you
will realize on that day when all things are made plain.

"Only remember that your destiny is high and arduous, and that a
single false step may throw you from a precipice that has taken years
to scale once, and that must be scaled again. For you walk among the
clouds, or very near them; you are not defiled by any gross habitual
sin; your heart is pure, and you have known suffering. You are a true
novice.

"In a year, as I have said, I shall claim your answer. And now
farewell for a season. When we next meet we shall have a larger
common ground; we shall be master and pupil no longer.

"You shall see the boy once again, by his wish and my own. He shall
go with you to your house to-night, and travel with you the first
stage to-morrow. I have arranged for his return."

He then conducted Arthur into the house, where he bade adieu to the
mistress and to the younger son; the elder, his charge that was to
be, meeting him as he came out, and accompanying him home. The boy
had formed a great attachment to him, and the idea of their future
relations sent a strange and unwonted glow into Arthur's mind, so
that he parted from him on the next day, "with wonder in his heart,"
and something very like an ache too.

This last episode will appear to my readers to be so fantastic as to
give the work at once a fictional character; they will say that on
some real lines I have constructed a romance of the wildest type,
and that Arthur is no longer an interesting personality, because as
a rule he is too ordinary to be ideal, in the last two chapters too
illusory to be real.

All I can urge is this: the chapters shall be their own defence. If I
had wished to present my readers with nothing but a dry chronicle of
facts I should have toned this down to something more prosaic. But
every one who has had any experience of life will know that her
surprises are sometimes very bewildering; that fiction is nothing but
uncommon experience made ordinary, or heaped inartistically upon a
single character.

It may be said that the man was mentally affected, in the latter
scene; in the former, that Arthur himself was the victim of a mental
disorder; but he left such vivid and detailed descriptions of both
events that I have been enabled to give one (the letter) exactly
as it stands, and the interview in Teheran is taken directly from
diaries—a little amplified and reconstructed, it is true, but only
when interpreted by the light of later events.

And this must be always the task of the true biographer; for the
biographer has to take a life _en masse_, and disentangling the
predominant and central threads, cast the rest away; in this process
rejecting facts and incidents whose isolated interest is often
greater than the interest of what he retains, because it is on the
latter that the pearls of life are, so to speak, strung.

In this case the two incidents I have kept are both so pregnant of
influence upon his later life, so necessary to the logical
development of his principles, that, in spite of their romantic, not
to say wild, character, I have retained them.




CHAPTER VII


About the middle of February, 1879, I was sitting at work in my
lodgings in Newman Street, when I was interrupted by the advent of my
landlady, to inform me that there was a gentleman below who wished to
see me. I told her to show him up, and she returned in a moment,
ushering in, to my extreme surprise, Arthur Hamilton. I confess I
hardly knew him at first. He had grown a beard, and looked thinner
and graver than he used to do. He had the same slow, almost stately
movement, with a slight and not ungraceful suggestion of languor;
his manner was somewhat changed, and very much improved; and he had
contracted, from living so long with strangers, a delightfully frank
and free way of speaking. He never gave me, as he used to, the least
feeling of constraint; he always seemed perfectly at his ease. And
he had acquired, too, the art of asking unobtrusive questions of a
tentative kind, so as to feel out the interests of his companion,
and draw him out; not in that professional way which so-called
influential people often acquire—the melancholy confidential smile,
the intimate manner, and the air of bland inattention with which they
receive your remarks, only to be detected in the fixed or wandering
eye. He had learnt the art of being interested in other people, and
in what they had to say, and of indicating by a subtle tact in speech
that he was following them, and intelligently sympathizing with them.

He did not then tell me much about himself. He confessed that the
most rapturous feeling he had known since he set off on his travels,
was the hour or two as he whirled through the flat pasture-lands and
the pleasant green of Kent.

He gave me no detailed descriptions of adventures, but hinted in a
suggestive way that he had seen much, and thought more. "I think I
have learnt myself very fairly," was the only remark he made about
his own personal experience.

"To finish my tour," he said, "I want to see something of my native
land. I have been away so long, that I don't know where to begin, and
I want you to help me. I want to be introduced to a few Christian
households, that I may see the kind of people that our Western
friends are."

I had an uncle, a Mr. Raymond, who had made a fortune in business,
lived in a fine house in Lancaster Gate, and saw a good deal of
fairly interesting and cultivated people. I took him to dine there
once or twice, and he needed nothing else. He had a real genius
for _tête-à-tête_ conversation; that is, he could listen without
appearing only to listen. He made people feel at their best with
him. My aunt's criticism of him was highly characteristic of the
British matron and her choice of friends.

"I thoroughly approve, Harry," she said to me, "of your friend, Mr.
Hamilton. He is very well-informed and clever, and he doesn't allow
it to make him in the least disagreeable." And starting from this, he
was asked to dinner by, and invited to visit, a fair selection of
pleasant people.

Of the events which immediately succeeded his return to England I
can not, for two reasons, give a very detailed account. In the first
place, dealing as they do with living people, I have thought it
better, after consultation with the friends of both, to leave the
outlines of the story rather vague; and secondly, there are great
gaps and deficiencies in diaries and letters, which, though I believe
I can supply, knowing what I do of the circumstances, I hardly like
to fill in in a narrative of fact.

He took a dose, as I have already said, of the London season. "Those
six weeks," he said, "absolutely knocked me up; my friends told me,
among other things, that my physiognomy, being of a grave and gloomy
cast, was of a kind that was not suitable to a festive occasion; and
so I used to come home at night with my jaws positively aching with
the effort of a perpetually fatuous grin."

The following extract, which I have selected from one of his letters
of this period, will give a good picture of his mind:

"I think that two of the things that move me most, not to sadness nor
indignation, but to those vague tumultuous feelings for which we
have, I think, no name, but which were formerly called melancholy,
are these:

"To come up-stairs after a hot London banquet, where you have been
sitting, talking the poorest trash, between two empty, worldly women;
and then, perhaps, listening to stories that are dull, or worse, and
see dullness personified in every one of the twelve faces that stare
at you with such sodden respectability through the cigarette smoke;
and then, I say, to come up-stairs, and see moving about among the
knowing selfish people a child with hair like gold thread, and
something of the regretful innocence of heaven in her eyes and
motions. If you can get her to talk to you, so much the better for
you; but if you or she are shy, as generally happens, to watch her
is something. God knows the insidious process by which she will be
transformed, step by step, into one of those godless fine ladies; for
it makes me inclined to pray that anything may happen to her first
that may hinder that development.

"The other thing is, under the same circumstances, to sit down and
hear some rippling melody of Bach's, a tender gavotte or a delicate
rapid fugue, just as it stole on to the paper in that quaint German
garden with the clipped yew-hedges and the tall summer-house in the
corner, in the master's pointed handwriting, calling down by his
magic wand the spirits of the air to aid him in the perfecting of the
exquisite phrase that some Ariel had whispered to him as he walked or
sat.

"To hear that little rill of Paradise breaking out in the glaring
room, not echoed or reflected in the rows of listless faces, gives me
a strange turn. It sweeps away for a minute or two, as it goes and
comes and returns upon itself until its sweet course is run, all the
hard and stifling web of convention and opinion that closes us in; it
takes me back for a moment to old-world fancies, till I seem to feel,
as I am always longing to feel, that we are separated only by a very
little flimsy hedge from the secrets of the beautiful, from the
shadow-land which is so real; and that every now and then a breeze
breaks and stirs across, with something of the fragrance of the place
in its wandering air."


He used to come to me in my rooms in Newman Street, on his way back
from an evening party or a ball, to smoke a cigar, and it was very
interesting to watch his growing disgust for the life, and the
grotesque and humorous ways in which he expressed it.

"Do I feel flat?" he used to say—"it isn't the word—bored to death.
Why, my dear Chris, if you'd heard the conversation of the lady next
me to-night, you'd have thought that the premier said, every morning
when his shaving-water was brought him, 'Another day! Whose happiness
can I mar? Whose ruin can I effect? What villainy can I execute
to-day?'"

One night, at dinner, he happened to sit next a young lady in whom
the fashionable world were a good deal interested.

It is impossible to give a fair sketch of her character; she was what
would now be called unconventional, and was then called fast.

She openly avowed her preference for men's society as compared to
female—women, as a rule, did not like her—she used to receive calls
from her own men friends in her own room whenever she liked, and it
was considered rather "compromising" to know her.

She was perfectly reckless about what she said and did. I questioned
Arthur about her conversation, for she was accused of telling
improper stories. "I have often," he said, "heard her allude to
things and tell stories that would be considered unusual, even
indelicate. But I never heard her say a thing in which there could
be any conceivable 'taint,' in which the point consisted in the
violation of the decent sense. The 'doubtful' element was rare and
always incidental."

Arthur told me a delightful story about her. Her father was a testy
old country gentleman, very irritable and obstinate.

It happened that an Eton boy was staying in the house, of the
blundering lumpish type; he had had more than his share of luck in
breaking windows and articles of furniture. One morning Mr. B——,
finding his study window broken, declared in a paroxysm of rage that
the next thing he broke the boy should go.

That same afternoon, it happened he was playing at small cricket with
Maud, and made a sharp cut into the great greenhouse. There was a
crash of glass, followed by Maud's ringing laugh.

They stopped their game, and went to discuss the position of events.
As they stood there, Mr. B——'s garden door, just round the corner,
was heard to open and slam, and craunch, craunch, came his stately
pace upon the gravel.

They stared with a humorous horror at one another. In an instant,
Maud caught up a lawn-tennis racquet that was near, and smashed the
next pane to atoms. Mr. B—— quickened his pace, hearing the crash,
and came round the corner with his most judicial and infuriated air,
rather hoping to pack the culprit out of the place, only to be met
by his favourite daughter. "Papa, I'm so sorry, I've broken the
greenhouse with my racquet. May I send for Smith? I'll pay him out of
my own money."

The Eton boy adored her from that day forth; and so did other people
for similar reasons.

I, personally, always rather wondered that Arthur was ever attracted
by Miss B——, for he was very fastidious, and the least suggestion
of aiming at effect or vulgarity, or hankering after notoriety, would
infallibly have disgusted him. But this was the reason.

She was never vulgar, never self-conscious. She acted on each
occasion on impulse, never calculating effects, never with reference
to other people's opinions.

A gentleman once said, remonstrating with her for driving alone with
a Cambridge undergraduate in his dog-cart down to Richmond after a
ball, "People are beginning to talk about you."

"What fools they must be!" said Miss B——, and showed not the
slightest inclination to hear more of the matter.

There is no question, I think, that Arthur's grave and humorous ways
attracted her. He, when at his best, was a racy and paradoxical
talker—with that natural tinge of veiled melancholy or cynicism
half-suspected which is so fascinating, as seeming to imply a
"_past_," a history. He ventured to speak to her more than once
about her tendency to "drift." He told me of one conversation in
particular.

"I think you have too many friends," he said to her once, at the
conclusion of an evening party at her own house. They were sitting in
a balcony looking out on to the square, where the trees were stirring
in the light morning wind.

"That's curious," she said. "I never feel as if I had enough; I have
room enough in my heart for the whole world." And she spread out her
hands to the great city with all her lights glaring before them.
"God knows I love you all, though I don't know you," she said with a
sudden impulse.

They were silent for a moment.

Then she resumed: "Tell me why you said that," she said. "I like to
be told the truth."

"_You_ may feel large enough," he said, "but they don't appreciate
your capacity; they feel hurt and slighted. Why, only to-night, during
the ten minutes I was talking to you, you spoke and dismissed eight
people, every one of whom was jealous of me, and thinking 'Who's the
new man?' And I began to wonder how I should feel if I came here and
found a new man installed by you, and got a handshake and a smile."

"Shall I tell you?" she said, looking at him. "I should give you a
look which would mean, 'I would give anything to have a quiet talk to
you, Mr. Hamilton, but the exigencies of society oblige me to be
civil to this person.'"

"Yes," he said, "and that's just what I complain of; it gives me, the
new man to-night, a feeling of insecurity—that perhaps you are just
'carrying on' with me because it is your whim, and that the instant
I bore you, you will throw me away like a broken toy, and with even
less regret."

"How dare you speak like that to me?" she said, turning upon him
almost fiercely. "I never forget people." And she rose and went
quickly into the room, and didn't speak to him for the rest of the
evening.

But just as he was going out he passed her, and hardly looked at her,
thinking he had offended her; but she came and put out her hand
quickly, and said, almost pathetically—

"You must forgive me for my behaviour to-night, Mr. Hamilton. What
you said was not true, but you meant it to be true; you believed it.
And please don't stop talking to me openly. I value it very much.
I have so few people to tell me the truth."

I find this conversation narrated in his diary, almost word for word
as I have given it. But there is omitted from it, necessarily
perhaps, the most pregnant comment of all.

"And yet," he said to me once, as he turned to leave the room after
commenting upon their freedom of speech with one another, "I am not
in love with her, though I can't think why I am not."

The sequel must be soon told. Miss B—— suddenly accepted a
gentleman who was in every way a suitable _parti_: heir to a peerage,
of fairly high character.

But to return to Arthur. I can not do better than quote a few
sentences of a letter he wrote to me on the event. It conceals—as he
was wont to do—strong feeling under the bantering tone.

"As you are in possession of most of my moral and mental diagnoses,
I had better communicate to you a new and disturbing element. You
remember what I said to you about Miss B——, that I did not care for
her. A fancied immunity is often a premonitory symptom of disease:
the system is excited into an instantaneous glow by the first contact
of the poisonous seed.

"I don't know, at present, quite how things are with me. I labour
under a great oppression of spirit. I have a strange thirsty longing
to see her face and hear her speech. If I could only hear from
herself that she had done what her best self—of which we have
often spoken—ratifies, I should feel more content. But she trusts
her impulses too much; and the habit of loving all she loves with
passion, blinds her a little. A woman who loves her sister, her pets,
the very sunshine and air with passion, hardly knows what a lover
is. I can not help feeling that I might have shown her a little
better than J——. Still one must accept facts and interpret them,
especially in cases where one has not even been allowed to try and
fail; for I never spoke to her a word of love. Ah, well! perhaps I
shall be stronger soon."




CHAPTER  VIII

Arthur Hamilton as an author


I must give a chapter to this subject, because it entered very
largely into Arthur's life, although he was singularly unsuccessful
as an author, considering the high level of his mental powers.

He lacked somehow, not exactly the gift of expression—his letters
testify to that—but the gift of proportion and combination.

His essays are disjointed—discursive and eloquent in parts, and bare
and meagre in others. Connections are omitted, passages of real and
rare beauty jostling with long passages of the most common-place
rhetoric. His platitudes, however, to myself who knew him, have a
genuine ring about them; he never admitted a truism into his writing
till it had become his own by vivid realization. As he himself says:

"I always find a peculiar interest in the solemn enunciation of a
platitude by a dull person who does not naturally aim at effect.
You feel sure it is the condensation of life and experience. Such
an utterance often brings a platitude home to me as no amount of
rhetorical writing can."

Still, the reading public will not stand this, and Arthur never found
a market.

He wrote voluminously.

I have in my bureau several pigeon-holes crammed with manuscripts in
his curious sprawling hand. He wrote, when he was in the mood, very
quickly, with hardly an erasure. Among them is:

1. A collection of poems (128 in all).

2. A complete novel, called "The Unencumbered Man."

3. Three incomplete novels, called "Physiognomy," "Helena,"
"From Hall to Hall."

4. Essays on historical and literary subjects, such as "Coleridge,"
"Bunyan," "The Earl of Surrey," "Lucian," etc. These, as far as I can
make out, are very poor.

5. A collection of semi-mystical writings and short stories. There is
a great fertility of imagination about these, and they are composed
in a very finished style. It is not improbable that I shall re-edit
these, as they seem to me to be distinctly first-rate work. I give a
short specimen of his mystical writing—a style of which he was very
fond. It is called:

"The Great Assize.

"Now, it came to pass that on a certain day the Gods were weary. Odin
sat upon his throne, and rested his chin upon his hand. And Thor came
in, and threw his hammer upon the earth, and said, 'I am weary of
walking up and down in the earth, of smiting and slaying; and I know
not how to bind or heal up, and I am too old to learn.' And Freya
said, 'I am weary of Valhalla and the birds and trees, the perpetual
sunshine and the feasts and laughter.' So also said all the Gods.

"And Odin, when the clamour was stilled, rose from his throne, and
spoke. He told them of an ancient law of the Gods, so ancient that it
seemed dim even to himself, that when the Gods should be heavy and be
sad at heart, they should appoint a judgment for men, should open
the everlasting records, and call the world to the assize; and Loki
should be the accuser, and Night and Day the witnesses, and Odin
should deliver sentence, with the Gods for assessors.

"So Thor stepped out upon the bar of heaven, and blew the steel
trumpet that is chained to the door-post of the hall.

"Shrill and angry came the sound of the great horn over earth, her
woods and valleys; and terrible was the sound of wailing and
lamentation. They prayed to the mountains to fall upon them, and the
sea to swallow them up; for they said, 'The secrets of the heart must
now be spoken. The Lord and our brethren will hear them. And who can
bear the shame? Oh, that we had not turned away!'

"But the winds of the earth, and the voices of the morning, and the
waves of the moaning sea drove them shrieking into the judgment hall,
and Loki began his accusation.

"And so foul a tale it was, that the men and women folk prayed and
cried no longer, but sank down in dull silence for fear. And the
stars that listened overhead shrank out of the sky, and the sea
stilled his waves to hear, and the very Gods turned pale and red
where they sat, to think that vileness and oppression had thriven so
upon the earth, and that deeds of shame had fallen so thick, and that
they had in no wise hindered it, but rather increased the sum of sin.

"At last the words of Loki were over, and left a burning silence in
the hall; and the sun and moon bowed their heads in witness, and
Night and Day said 'Yea,' and 'Truth, he has told truth.'

"Then there was a silence, and all looked at Odin as he sat, sunk
down and silent, in his chair, staring at the shrinking crowd with
eyes of shame, and majesty, and anger.

"And at the last he rose, and he was clad in grey mists from head to
foot, with a cloud of gleaming gold upon his head, like the sunlight
on white cliffs seen over the sea through the haze of a summer
morning.

"But ere he opened his lips to speak, one who sat among the folk
arose and came up the hall, walking strongly and briskly like a king,
and looking about him with a resolute and cheerful face to left and
right.

"And all held their breath to see him pass, wondering what this thing
might be.

"But the man, when he had reached the middle of the hall, cried with
a loud voice, 'Hold.'

"And Odin's face gleamed white with rage through the fringes of the
mist, and he said between his teeth, 'Who art thou?'

"And at his voice Freya started and blanched, and wrapped herself in
her robe.

"And the man said, in a clear loud voice, not defiant, but with a
certain royalty about it—

"'Lord Odin, I am he of whom thou spokest but now; he of whom the
ancient oracles have spoken, whom thou knowest, and yet knowest not.'

"And Odin said, 'I know thee not; stand aside therefore, that I may
judge thee and thy fellows.'

"And there was a hideous silence for a moment while you might count a
score, and the twain stared upon each other.

"Then the man said, in the same voice that shook not nor quivered,
'When the Gods shall sit in order to judge the earth, then shall one
come out of the midst of created things, through the earth, and
walking upon it; and at his coming the pillars of Valhalla shall be
snapped, and the everlasting halls shall fall.' And he added other
words, which the Gods knew, but not the men or women folk. And when
he ceased speaking there blew as it were a whirlwind out of Valhalla,
and the high Gods passed away, as it were in skeins and fringes of
hanging mist. Then there were lightnings and thunders, and the earth
shook; and terrible voices were heard in heaven, passing to and fro.
And one said, 'Hence, ye that corrupt justice;' and another said,
'The brood of the eagle is come home to roost;' and another, 'The
roof is down.' And then there were yells and groans; and among
mankind there was weeping and laughter, many smiles and tears, and
they cried to the stranger, 'Judge us, thou king of Gods and men.'
But he, turning, said, 'Nay, but ye are judged already.' Then was
there peace on earth."


There are, besides these, several unfinished studies, and two or
three note-books full of jotted conversations and thoughts of all
kinds—a curious mixture.

He carefully left all the publishers' letters which he received in
answer to his application. They are twenty-two in number, and are all
refusals. They are tied carefully up, and are labeled, "My Literary
Career."

All these compositions are the work of about seven years, except some
of the poems which were written at Cambridge. The novel was begun and
finished in about six weeks, in 1878. It is a poor plot, and mawkish
in character, though not without merits of style.

During all this time his interest in writing never flagged. He felt
that he had one or two ideas, on which he had a firm grasp, to
communicate to the world, and he worked at them incessantly in new
and ever-varying forms.

The issue would seem to show that he was not destined to communicate
them directly to others—at least, in his own lifetime; and, indeed,
no one was quicker at interpreting events than himself. He gave the
enterprise a long and severe trial, but the resolute front with which
he was met, showed him clearly that it was not to be. It may be that
the record of his life, little as he ever imagined it would come
before the world, may effect a part of what he himself prepared to
do.

Occasionally, for he was of quick sensibilities, throughout this
period he felt the bitterness of constant rebuff. The following
letter he wrote me shows it:

"I am beginning to feel as if publishers had a code of signals or
private marks like freemasonry, which they scribble sometimes, like
the concealed marks on bank-notes, on the first page of a manuscript,
so as to spare their brother publishers the trouble of looking
through a manuscript which is below market value. I have never had a
manuscript accepted which has been once refused; and I now eagerly
scan the first page, to see if I can discover a wriggling mark in the
margin or among the lines which is to tell Smith and Co. that Brown
and Son has a very poor opinion of the book now under his
consideration."

And again, quite as forcible is a little anecdote with which he
begins an unfinished paper on "Genius." The story is, I now believe,
his own; though, at the time, I fancied it was adopted:

"There was once a king who sat to listen to the sermon of a great
preacher. From minute to minute the great words flowed on, consoling,
wounding, helping, condemning, dividing the marrow from the bones;
and the king wept and smiled.

"And at the end he sent for the preacher, and said, 'Sir, Christ is
the only king; yet let me look at the book from which you made your
discourse. The written words, though half despoiled of their grace,
may perhaps strike an echo in my soul, which rings yet.'

"And for some time the preacher was unwilling, and parleyed with the
king; but at the last he drew out a little pale book with faded
characters traced in ink; and he opened it at a well-worn page, and
held it out before the king.

"And the king looked, and saw nothing except the crabbed printed
lines.

"So he said, 'Not your text-book, sir, but the book from which your
arguments are rehearsed.'

"'Sire,' said the preacher, 'look but once more upon the book.' And
he showed him that four of the words upon the page had a thin line
drawn in ink below them. 'That was the writing of my discourse,' he
said."

Neither, it must be remembered, was Arthur a first-rate
conversationalist. He did not steer a conversation; he could keep
the ball going creditably when it was once started; but he never
communicated to the circle in which he was that indefinable interest
which is so intangible and yet so unmistakable.

The two points that I spoke of that he is always trying to work out
in his books are:

(1) the strength of temperament, and the difficulty, almost
impossibility, of altering it. "The most we can do is to register
change," are the first words of his novel. In this book, the
situation of which is not a very unusual one, the hero falls in love
with one of two sisters, of rare personal beauty and attractiveness,
but no particular intellect. He soon wearies of her, being of
that fantastic, weak, discontented spirit which Arthur invariably
portrayed in his heroes—drawing it I can not conceive whence—and
then falls in love with the other, as he ought to have done all
along, being, as she is, fully his match in intellect, and far above
him in heart and strength of character. The wife at the crisis of
this other love, is killed in a street accident, and remorse ensues.
But the book is a weary one; it bears upon its face the burden of
sorrow. "How could this have been otherwise?" is the keynote of the
story.

Along with this, and indeed as a development of this central