rding to the Roman historians, to
meet with defeat and discomfiture.

Of Burton's carelessness and inaccuracies, we have already spoken. We
mentioned that to his dying day he was under a wrong impression as to
his birthplace, and that his account of his early years and his family
bristles with errors. Scores of his letters have passed through my
hands and nearly all are imperfectly dated. Fortunately, however, the
envelopes have in almost every case been preserved; so the postmark,
when legible, has filled the lacuna. At every turn in his life we are
reminded of his inexactitude--especially in autobiographical details.
And yet, too, like most inexact men, he was a rare stickler for certain
niceties. He would have defended the "h" in Meccah with his sword; and
the man who spelt "Gypsy" with an "i" for ever forfeited his respect.

Burton's works--just as was his own mind--are vast, encyclopaedic,
romantic and yet prosaic, unsystematic; but that is only repeating the
line of the old Greek poet:

"Like our own selves our work must ever be." [533]

Chapter XXXII. 5th June 1886-15th April 1888, Burton and Social
Questions: Anecdotes

147. The Population Question.

In social questions Burton took a keen interest. Indeed he was in many
respects a man far in advance of his age. In denouncing various evils he
betrays the earnestness of a Carlyle, and when propounding plans for the
abolition of the Slave Trade in "that Devil's Walk and Purlieu," East
Africa, Saul becomes one of the prophets. That he was no saint we should
have known if he himself had not told us; but he had, as he believed,
his special work to do in the world and he did it with all his might.
Though a whirlwind of a man, he had, as we have seen, the tenderest of
hearts, he thought with sorrow of the sufferings of the poor, and he
often said to his wife: "When I get my pension we'll spend the rest of
our lives in helping the submerged tenth." Although sympathising warmly
with the efforts of General Booth and other men who were trying to
grapple with social evils, he could see, nevertheless, that they touched
only the fringe of the difficulty. He was, broadly speaking, what is
now known as a Neo-Mathusian, that is to say, he held that no man had a
right to bring into the world a larger number of children than he could
support with comfort, that the poor ought to be advised to limit their
families, and that persons suffering from certain terrib