to commemorate him. If one analyses the feeling underneath
the words, it will be seen to consist of a desire to be remembered,
a hope almost amounting to a belief that his work was worthy of
commemoration, coupled with a sincere desire not to exaggerate its
value. And yet silence would have attested his humility far more
effectually than any calculated speech!

The dramatic sense is not a thing which necessarily increases as life
goes on; some people have it from the very beginning. I have an elderly
friend who is engaged on a very special sort of scientific research of
a wholly unimportant kind. He is just as incapable as my sympathetic
friend of talking about anything except his own interests; "You don't
mind my speaking about my work?" he says with a brilliant smile; "you
see it means so much to me." And then, after explaining some highly
technical detail, he will add: "Of course this seems to you very minute,
but it is work that has got to be done by some one; it is only laying a
little stone in the temple of science. Of course I often feel I should
like to spread my wings and take a wider flight, but I do seem to have
a special faculty for this kind of work, and I suppose it is my duty
to stick to it." And he will pass his hand wearily over his brow, and
expound another technical detail. He apologises ceaselessly for dwelling
on his own work; but in no place or company have I ever heard him do
otherwise; and he is certainly one of the happiest people I know.

But, on the other hand, it is a rather charming quality to find in
combination with a certain balance of mind. Unless a man is interesting
to himself he cannot easily be interesting to others; there is a
youthful and ingenuous sense of romance and drama which can exist side
by side with both modesty and sympathy, somewhat akin to the habit
common to imaginative children of telling themselves long stories in
which they are the heroes of the tale. But people who have this faculty
are generally mildly ashamed of it; they do not believe that their
fantastic adventures are likely to happen. They only think how pleasant
it would be if things arranged themselves so. It all depends whether
such dramatisation is looked upon in the light of an amusement, or
whether it is applied in a heavy-handed manner to real life. Imaginative
children, who have true sympathy and affection as well, generally end by
finding the real world, as they grow up into it, such an astonishing