enounced, desired it as an object of study. I
was often puzzled as to when and where he could have met the famous men or
beautiful women, whose conversation, often wise, and always appropriate,
he quoted so often, and it was not till a little before his death that I
discovered that these conversations were imaginary. He never altered a
detail of speech, and would quote what he had invented for Gladstone or
Newman for years without amplification or amendment, with what seemed a
scholar's accuracy. His favourite quotations were from Newman, whom, I
believe, he had never met, though I can remember nothing now but Newman's
greeting to Johnson, "I have always considered the profession of a man of
letters a third order of the priesthood!" and these quotations became so
well known that at Newman's death, the editor of _The Nineteenth Century_
asked them for publication. Because of his delight in all that was formal
and arranged he objected to the public quotation of private conversation
even after death, and this scruple helped his refusal. Perhaps this
dreaming was made a necessity by his artificial life, yet before that life
began he wrote from Oxford to his Tory but flattered family, that as he
stood mounted upon a library ladder in his rooms taking a book from a
shelf, Gladstone, about to pass the open door on his way upstairs to some
college authority, had stopped, hesitated, come into the room and there
spent an hour of talk. Presently it was discovered that Gladstone had not
been near Oxford on the date given; yet he quoted that conversation
without variation of a word until the end of his life, and I think
believed in it as firmly as did his friends. These conversations were
always admirable in their drama, but never too dramatic or even too
polished to lose their casual accidental character; they were the
phantasmagoria through which his philosophy of life found its expression.
If he made his knowledge of the world out of his phantasy, his knowledge
of tongues and books was certainly very great; and yet was that knowledge
as great as he would have us believe? Did he really know Welsh, for
instance, had he really as he told me, made his only love song, his
incomparable _Morfydd_ out of three lines in Welsh, heard sung by a woman
at her door on a walking tour in Wales, or did he but wish to hide that he
shared in their emotion?

"O, what are the winds?
And what are the waters?
Mine are your eyes."

He wanted