r, the essence of the old
fashion of letter-writing lying, as with true essay-writing, in the
dexterous availing oneself of accident and circumstance, in the
prosecution of deeper lines of observation; although, just as with the
record of his conversation, one loses something, in losing the actual
tones of the stammerer, still graceful in his halting, as he halted
also in composition, composing slowly and by fits, "like a Flemish
painter," as he tells us, so "it is to be regretted," says the editor
of his letters, "that in the printed letters the reader will lose the
curious varieties of writing with which the originals abound, and which
are scrupulously adapted to the subject."

Also, he was a true "collector," delighting [119] in the personal
finding of a thing, in the colour an old book or print gets for him by
the little accidents which attest previous ownership. Wither's
Emblems, "that old book and quaint," long-desired, when he finds it at
last, he values none the less because a child had coloured the plates
with his paints. A lover of household warmth everywhere, of that
tempered atmosphere which our various habitations get by men's living
within them, he "sticks to his favourite books as he did to his
friends," and loved the "town," with a jealous eye for all its
characteristics, "old houses" coming to have souls for him. The
yearning for mere warmth against him in another, makes him content, all
through life, with pure brotherliness, "the most kindly and natural
species of love," as he says, in place of the passion of love. Brother
and sister, sitting thus side by side, have, of course, their
anticipations how one of them must sit at last in the faint sun alone,
and set us speculating, as we read, as to precisely what amount of
melancholy really accompanied for him the approach of old age, so
steadily foreseen; make us note also, with pleasure, his successive
wakings up to cheerful realities, out of a too curious musing over what
is gone and what remains, of life. In his subtle capacity for enjoying
the more refined points of earth, of human relationship, he could throw
the gleam of poetry or humour on what seemed common or threadbare; has
a care for the [120] sighs, and the weary, humdrum preoccupations of
very weak people, down to their little pathetic "gentilities," even;
while, in the purely human temper, he can write of death, almost like
Shakespeare.

And that care, through all his enthusiasm of di