thing, however small or apparently remote from
the main studies of his life, to be trivial or unfruitful. His
imagination vitalised the small things, and found a place for them in
the pictures he was always sketching out.

As this faculty of discerning hidden meanings and relations was one
index and consequence of his imaginative power, so another was found
in that artistic gift to which I have referred. To give literary form
to everything was a necessity of his intellect. He could not tell an
anecdote or repeat a conversation without unconsciously dramatising
it, putting into people's mouths better phrases than they would have
themselves employed, and giving a finer point to the moral which the
incident expressed. Verbal accuracy suffered, but what he thought the
inner truth came out the more fully.

Though he wrote very fast, and in the most familiar way, the style of
his more serious letters was as good, I might say as finished, as that
of his books. Every one of them had a beginning, middle, and end. The
ideas were developed in an apt and graceful order, the sentences could
all be construed, the diction was choice. It was the same with the
short articles which he at one time used to write for the _Saturday
Review_. They are little essays, some of them worthy to live not only
for the excellent matter they contain, but for the delicate refinement
of their form. Yet they were all written swiftly, and sometimes in the
midst of physical exhaustion. The friend I have previously quoted
describes the genesis of one. Green had reached the town of Troyes
early one morning with two companions, and immediately started off to
explore it, darting hither and thither through the streets like a dog
trying to find a scent. In two or three hours the examination was
complete. The friends lunched together, took the train on to Basel,
got there late, and went off to bed. Green, however, wrote before he
slept, and laid on the breakfast-table next morning, an article on
Troyes, in which its characteristic features were brought out and
connected with its fortunes and those of the Counts of Champagne
during some centuries, an article which was really a history in
miniature. Then they went out together to look at Basel, and being
asked some question about that city he gave on the spur of the moment
a sketch of its growth and character equally vivid and equally
systematic, grouping all he had to say round two or three leading
theories. Yet h