ut save for a felt and remembered
impulse in me to open the window of our scene of study as soon as he had
gone was in no degree an ideal. He might rise here, could I do him
justice, as the rarest of my poor evocations; for he it was, to be
frank, who most literally smelt of the vieux temps--as to which I have
noted myself as wondering and musing as much as might be, with recovered
scraps and glimpses and other intimations, only never yet for such a
triumph of that particular sense. To be still frank, he was little less
than a monster--for mere unresisting or unresilient mass of personal
presence I mean; so that I fairly think of him as a form of bland
porpoise, violently blowing in an age not his own, as by having had to
exchange deep water for thin air. Thus he impressed me as with an
absolute ancientry of type, of tone, of responsible taste, above all;
this last I mean in literature, since it was literature we sociably
explored, to my at once charmed and shamed apprehension of the several
firm traditions, the pure proprieties, the discussabilities, in the
oddest way both so many and so few, of that field as they prevailed to
his pious view. I must have had hold, in this mere sovereign sample of
the accidentally, the quite unconsciously and unpretentiously, the all
negligibly or superfluously handed-down, of a rare case of the
provincial and academic _cuistre_; though even while I record it I see
the good man as too helpless and unaggressive, too smothered in his poor
facts of person and circumstance, of overgrown time of life alone, to
incur with justness the harshness of classification. He rested with a
weight I scarce even felt--such easy terms he made, without scruple, for
both of us--on the cheerful innocence of my barbarism; and though our
mornings were short and subject, I think, to quite drowsy lapses and
other honest aridities, we did scumble together, I make out, by the aid
of the collected extracts from the truly and academically great which
formed his sole resource and which he had, in a small portable and
pocketed library rather greasily preserved, some patch of picture of a
saving as distinguished from a losing classicism. The point remains for
me that when all was said--and even with everything that might directly
have counted unsaid--he discharged for me such an office that I was to
remain to this far-off hour in a state of possession of him that is the
very opposite of a blank: quite after the fashion a