had showed—as in giving her advice in such a delicate matter as her difficulties with her famous brother. But she had a struggle. He was, she says, 'in affections mild,' but could not be called 'in manners gentle.' His celebrity, she thinks, was 'sublimated, as one may say, with terror and with love.' He was very rarely or never 'intentionally asperous' (Miss Reynolds has some delightful phrases), unless in defence of religion or morality: but he 'inverted the common forms of civilised society.' Miss Reynolds looks upon him as a monstrous combination—a sage, if not a saint, confined by a strange freak of nature in the outside of a Caliban. Nobody, accordingly, has given more singular accounts of his amazing appearance: especially his performance of what she calls his 'straddles.' She tells how he would suddenly contort his feet into a geometrical diagram, while his hands were raised as high as possible above his head, or apparently meant to imitate a jockey at full speed; how, when he passed through a door, he would whirl poor blind Miss Williams about as he whirled and twisted in his gesticulation, or else leave her groping outside while he made a spring across the threshold, apparently attempting (in modern phrase) to
