an omnivorous reader. He expressed warm admiration
for Chaucer, "jolly old Walter Mapes," Butler's Hudibras, and Byron,
especially Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, with its allusions to his beloved
Tasso, Ariosto and Boccaccio. Surely, however, he ought not to have
tried to set us against that tender line of Byron's,

"They keep his dust in Arqua, where he died," [509]

by pointing out that the accent of Arqua is rightly on the second
syllable, and by remarking: "Why will not poets mind their quantities in
lieu of stultifying their lines by childish ignorance." [510] Then, too,
he savagely attacked Tennyson for his "rasher of bacon line"--"the good
Haroun Alraschid," [511] Raschid being properly accented on the last
syllable. Of traveller authors, he preferred "the accurate Burckhardt."
He read with delight Boswell's Johnson, Johnson's Journey to the
Western Islands, Renan's Life of Jesus, Gibbon, whom he calls "our great
historian" [512] and the poems of Coleridge. At Cowper he never lost an
opportunity of girding, both on account of his Slave Ballads [513] and
the line:

"God made the country and man made the town." [514]

"Cowper," he comments, "had evidently never seen a region untouched
by the human hand." It goes without saying that he loved "his great
namesake," as he calls him, "Robert Burton, of melancholy and merry, of
facete and juvenile memory." Of contemporary work he enjoyed most the
poems of D. G. Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. John Payne and FitzGerald's
Rubaiyat, and we find him praising Mr. Edmund Gosse's lyrics. Of
novelists Dickens was his favourite. He called Darwin "our British
Aristotle." Eothen [515] was "that book of books." He never forgave
Carlyle for denouncing The Arabian Nights as "downright lies" and
"unwholesome literature;" Miss Martineau, as an old maid, was, of
course, also out of court. If she had written Shakespeare, it would have
been all the same. He enjoyed a pen and ink fight, even as in those old
Richmond School days he had delighted in fisticuffs. "Peace and quiet
are not in my way." And as long as he got his adversary down he was
still not very particular what method he employed.

Unlike so many of his fellow-countrymen, he was a lover or art, and
had visited all the galleries in Europe. "If anyone," he used to say,
"thinks the English have the artistic eye, let him stand in the noblest
site in Europe, Trafalgar Square, and look around." On another occasion
he described th