, may develop with age into efficient mousing.

As to sagacity, I should say that his judgment respecting the
warmest place and the softest cushion in a room is infallible;
his punctuality at meal-times is admirable; and his
pertinacity in jumping on people's shoulders, till they
give him some of the best of what is going, indicates great
firmness.

XVIII

SOME LETTERS AND TABLE TALK

My father's letters were seldom without a dash of playfulness or
humour somewhere; a thing always fresh and spontaneous, unlike the
calculated or laboured playfulness sometimes to be observed in the
epistolary touch of literary folk. A capital example is a note to
Matthew Arnold, at whose house he had left his umbrella. Arnold, it
may be added, had recently been critically engaged upon the works of
Bishop Wilson:--

Look at Bishop Wilson on the sin of covetousness, and then
inspect your umbrella stand. You will there see a beautiful
brown smooth-handled umbrella which is _not_ your property.

Think of what the excellent prelate would have advised, and
bring it with you next time you come to the Club. The porter
will take care of it for me.

Sometimes the words will come trippingly from the pen as if they were
flung out in a brilliant flash of talk, like the following sketch of
human character:--

Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture of
horse-nervousness, ass-stubbornness, and camel-malice--with
an angel bobbing about unexpectedly like the apple in the
posset--and when they can do exactly as they please they are
very hard to drive.

As to his conversation, that, wrote the late Wilfrid Ward,

was singularly finished and (if I may so express it)
clean cut; never long-winded or prosy; enlivened by vivid
illustrations. He was an excellent _raconteur_, and his
stories had a stamp of their own which would have made them
always and everywhere acceptable. His sense of humour and
economy of words would have made it impossible, had he lived
to ninety, that they should ever have been disparaged as
symptoms of what has been called "anecdotage."

Some fragments of his talk have been preserved by the same hand.
Speaking of Tennyson's conversation, he said: "Doric beauty is its
characteristic--perfect simplicity, without any ornament or anything
artificial."

Telling how he had been to a meeting of the British Museum Tru