and I found nothing I cared for after Titian, and Titian I knew
from an imitation of his _Supper of Emmaus_ in Dublin, till Blake and the
Pre-Raphaelites; and among my father's friends were no Pre-Raphaelites.
Some indeed had come to Bedford Park in the enthusiasm of the first
building and others to be near those that had. There was Todhunter, a
well-off man who had bought my father's pictures while my father was still
Pre-Raphaelite; once a Dublin doctor he was now a poet and a writer of
poetical plays; a tall, sallow, lank, melancholy man, a good scholar and a
good intellect; and with him my father carried on a warm exasperated
friendship, fed I think by old memories and wasted by quarrels over
matters of opinion. Of all the survivors he was the most dejected and the
least estranged, and I remember encouraging him, with a sense of worship
shared, to buy a very expensive carpet designed by Morris. He displayed it
without strong liking and would have agreed had there been any to find
fault. If he had liked anything strongly he might have been a famous man,
for a few years later he was to write, under some casual patriotic
impulse, certain excellent verses now in all Irish anthologies; but with
him every book was a new planting, and not a new bud on an old bough. He
had I think no peace in himself. But my father's chief friend was York
Powell, a famous Oxford Professor of history, a broad-built, broad-headed,
brown-bearded man clothed in heavy blue cloth and looking, but for his
glasses and the dim sight of a student, like some captain in the merchant
service. One often passed with pleasure from Todhunter's company to that
of one who was almost ostentatiously at peace. He cared nothing for
philosophy, nothing for economics, nothing for the policy of nations; for
history, as he saw it, was a memory of men who were amusing or exciting to
think about. He impressed all who met him, and seemed to some a man of
genius, but he had not enough ambition to shape his thought, or conviction
to give rhythm to his style and remained always a poor writer. I was too
full of unfinished speculations and premature convictions to value rightly
his conversation, informed by a vast erudition, which would give itself to
every casual association of speech and company, precisely because he had
neither cause nor design. My father, however, found Powell's concrete
narrative manner in talk a necessary completion of his own, and when I
asked him in a l