s maintenance of opinion, and pursuit of public objects with
disregard of self, was one of very high example. So averse was Mr. Dilke
to every kind of display that his name appears to none of the literary
investigations which were conducted by him with an acuteness wonderful
as his industry, and it was in accordance with his express instructions
that the literary journal which his energy and self-denial had
established kept silence respecting him at his death.

[256] One day before, the 8th of June 1865, his old friend Sir Joseph
Paxton had breathed his last.

[257] Here are allusions to it at that time. "I have got a boot on
to-day,--made on an Otranto scale, but really not very discernible from
its ordinary sized companion." After a few days' holiday: "I began to
feel my foot stronger the moment I breathed the sea air. Still, during
the ten days I have been away, I have never been able to wear a boot
after four or five in the afternoon, but have passed all the evenings
with the foot up, and nothing on it. I am burnt brown and have walked by
the sea perpetually, yet I feel certain that if I wore a boot this
evening, I should be taken with those torments again before the night
was out." This last letter ended thus: "As a relief to my late dismal
letters, I send you the newest American story. Backwoods Doctor is
called in to the little boy of a woman-settler. Stares at the child some
time through a pair of spectacles. Ultimately takes them off, and says
to the mother: 'Wa'al Marm, this is small-pox. 'Tis Marm, small-pox. But
I am not posted up in Pustuls, and I do not know as I could bring him
along slick through it. But I'll tell you wa'at I can do Marm:--I can
send him a draft as will certainly put him into a most etarnal Fit, and
I am almighty smart at Fits, and we might git round Old Grisly that
way.'"

[258] I give one such instance: "The railway people have offered, in the
case of the young man whom I got out of the carriage just alive, all the
expenses and a thousand pounds down. The father declines to accept the
offer. It seems unlikely that the young man, whose destination is India,
would ever be passed for the Army now by the Medical Board. The question
is, how far will that contingency tell, under Lord Campbell's Act?"

[259] He wrote to me on the 15th of March from Dublin: "So profoundly
discouraging were the accounts from here in London last Tuesday that I
held several councils with Chappell about coming