insane, I heard vouched for repeatedly in London years later. For an interval before the breakdown came, he was editor, or part-editor, of the Spectator, and in some similar connexion, as owner or editor, he served the Fortnightly too. George Eliot he knew well, giving me vivid descriptions of her famous Sundays, and of his talks with George Henry Lewes and Herbert Spencer. He claimed to be the original of Daniel Deronda. He was a pupil of Sterndale Bennett's on the piano. Of his friendship with Cardinal Manning he had also much to tell.
It was in the domain of politics that I first began to notice the exaggeration and incoherence of his mind, and it was "in politics," evidently, that the deep wounds which would not heal had been received. In music, poetry, literature, above all in law, his intelligence had remained clear and sound, his judgments consummate, his knowledge encyclopædic. Large tracts of memory in him were, apparently, obliterated, whole stretches of life submerged, but his legal attainments had remained untouched. A business friend of mine "briefed" him to lecture on International, Company and Patent Law; and the substance of those "Lectures" stood the test, years later, of the highest English and French Courts.
The lonely old man's kingdom was his mind, and he dwelt in it aloof, secure, contented, unassailable. Into the big empty stretches a half education had left in my own, he poured his riches with unstinted satisfaction, even with delight. Worldly advice he never proffered; the world had left him aside, he, in his turn, left the world aside. To practical questions he merely shook his Moses-head: "That," he would say, "you must decide for yourself. Considered in relation to the Eternities, it is of little moment in any case." To any question, however, of a philosophical kind, to any enquiry for explanation about what perplexed or interested me in the realm of thought, he would reply with what I can only call a lecture, but a lecture so lucid, so packed with knowledge and learning, with classical comment and quotation, often with passages of moving eloquence, and invariably in language
