ho
is that?" "Merely me, sir," he called back, "taking your boots." The other
was of a martyr's Bible, round which the cardinal virtues had taken
personal form--this a fragment of Blake's philosophy. It was in the
possession of an old clergyman when a certain jockey called upon him, and
the cardinal virtues, confused between jockey and clergyman, devoted
themselves to the jockey. As whenever he sinned a cardinal virtue
interfered and turned him back to virtue, he lived in great credit, and
made, but for one sentence, a very holy death. As his wife and family
knelt round in admiration and grief he suddenly said "damn." "O my dear,"
said his wife, "what a dreadful expression." He answered, "I am going to
heaven," and straightway died. It was a long tale, for there were all the
jockey's vain attempts to sin, as well as all the adventures of the
clergyman, who became very sinful indeed, but it ended happily for when
the jockey died the cardinal virtues returned to the clergyman. I think he
would talk to any audience that offered, one audience being the same as
another in his eyes, and it may have been for this reason that my father
called him unambitious. When he was a young man he had befriended a
reformed thief and had asked the grateful thief to take him round the
thieves' quarters of London. The thief, however, hurried him away from the
worst saying, "Another minute and they would have found you out. If they
were not the stupidest of men in London, they had done so already." Ellis
had gone through a detailed, romantic and witty account of all the houses
he had robbed and all the throats he had cut in one short life.

His conversation would often pass out of my comprehension, or indeed I
think of any man's, into a labyrinth of abstraction and subtlety and then
suddenly return with some verbal conceit or turn of wit. The mind is known
to attain in certain conditions of trance a quickness so extraordinary
that we are compelled at times to imagine a condition of unendurable
intellectual intensity from which we are saved by the merciful stupidity
of the body, and I think that the mind of Edwin Ellis was constantly upon
the edge of trance. Once we were discussing the symbolism of sex in the
philosophy of Blake and had been in disagreement all the afternoon. I
began talking with a new sense of conviction and after a moment Ellis, who
was at his easel, threw down his brush and said that he had just seen the
same explanation in a