y:
"Nothing of what is nobly done can ever be lost." It is also to be noted
as in the same spirit, that it was not the loud but the silent heroisms
he most admired. Of Sir John Richardson, one of the few who have lived
in our days entitled to the name of a hero, he wrote from Paris in 1856.
"Lady Franklin sent me the whole of that Richardson memoir; and I think
Richardson's manly friendship, and love of Franklin, one of the noblest
things I ever knew in my life. It makes one's heart beat high, with a
sort of sacred joy." (It is the feeling as strongly awakened by the
earlier exploits of the same gallant man to be found at the end of
Franklin's first voyage, and never to be read without the most exalted
emotion.) It was for something higher than mere literature he valued the
most original writer and powerful teacher of the age. "I would go at all
times farther to see Carlyle than any man alive."

Of his attractive points in society and conversation I have
particularized little, because in truth they were himself. Such as they
were, they were never absent from him. His acute sense of enjoyment gave
such relish to his social qualities that probably no man, not a great
wit or a professed talker, ever left, in leaving any social gathering, a
blank so impossible to fill up. In quick and varied sympathy, in ready
adaptation to every whim or humour, in help to any mirth or game, he
stood for a dozen men. If one may say such a thing, he seemed to be
always the more himself for being somebody else, for continually putting
off his personality. His versatility made him unique. What he said once
of his own love of acting, applied to him equally when at his happiest
among friends he loved; sketching a character, telling a story, acting a
charade, taking part in a game; turning into comedy an incident of the
day, describing the last good or bad thing he had seen, reproducing in
quaint, tragical, or humorous form and figure, some part of the
passionate life with which all his being overflowed. "Assumption has
charms for me so delightful--I hardly know for how many wild
reasons--that I feel a loss of Oh I can't say what exquisite foolery,
when I lose a chance of being some one not in the remotest degree like
myself." How it was, that, from one of such boundless resource in
contributing to the pleasure of his friends, there was yet, as I have
said, so comparatively little to bring away, may be thus explained. But
it has been also seen th