nor, to tell the whole truth, the necessary sympathy. Our paths, if they seemed to run parallel for a moment, diverged very early in life, and I could never take much interest in the work to which he devoted his real, though, I venture to think, somewhat narrow gifts. He was still a young man—barely thirty-six—when he died, but he had already become eminent in his own particular line, that of the newer art criticism, invented, I believe, by the Italian, Morelli. It was scarcely a career to bring him much under the public eye, but his "Study of the Drawings of the Early Italian Masters" gained him, I understand, the recognition of a small number of persons, of various nationalities, occupied in making similar researches. He was busy with the proofs of the second and larger edition of this work when, on the 10th of September, 1911, he died under tragic circumstances. The mystery of his death, about which there was some noise in the papers at the time, will, I think, never now be cleared up, though, to my own mind, it is perfectly clear that he was murdered.
In relation to the autobiography, a word or two of comment and explanation is possibly due to the reader. To begin with, I have altered all the proper names save two—my own, and that of Mrs. Carroll, of Derryaghy, Newcastle, County Down, his oldest friend, which I have allowed to remain. I feel this, myself, to be unsatisfactory, but I cannot see how at present it is to be avoided. Again, though I have added nothing, I have left out a few pages—only a few—and none, I believe, of importance, so far as the understanding of the whole is concerned. For this I have no excuse to offer, except that it seemed to me that he himself should have omitted them.
In the main the portrait he has given of himself coincides with my own impression of him in early life. I can remember very well when I first came to know him at school.
