INTRODUCTION
exuberant gaiety and light-heartedness: Mrs. Clarkson[1] says of him, when he is close on seventy, that he is "as much a boy as ever." Wordsworth, just before H. C. R. goes on his long Italian tour in 1829, calls him "a healthy creature" who talks of coming again in seven years as others would of seven days. He himself confesses: "I have through life had animal spirits in a high degree." Dr. Sadler's choice of a motto for the Diary is thus peculiarly appropriate:
A Man he seems of cheerful yesterdays
And confident to-morrows; with a face
Not worldly-minded, for it bears too much
Of Nature's impress—gaiety and health.
Freedom and hope; but keen withal, and shrewd.
His gestures note—and, hark! his tones of voice
Are all vivacious as his mien and looks.
This vivacity, combined with much practice in private and in public, helped him to shine in conversation as well as in more formal speaking. When he was past ninety, standing up to deliver it, he made a long and vigorous speech on the subject of the election of a professor of Logic at University College, London, speaking, he says, "with more passion than propriety," the sort of comment with which his readers become very familiar while perusing the Diary. But it was in private that he excelled as a talker and as a listener, and his gifts in these respects were cordially recognized by all with whom he came in contact. "The elements of conversational power in H. C. R.," says De Morgan, "were a quick and witty grasp of meaning, a wide knowledge of letters and of men-of-letters, a sufficient but not too exacting perception of the relevant, and an extraordinary power of memory." He had, too, an enormous repertory of anecdotes, and, if we may believe the rather sharp (but affectionately
- ↑ The wife of the abolitionist. She had been a kind of elder sister to him from his boyhood onwards.
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