exchange a not
unfrequent little joke--like a pinch of snuff--and to indicate for them
the shoals to be avoided and the channels to be followed with flowing
sail in the speech of the year; after which, if perchance there were any
malignant in the company who took objection, suppose, to the claims of
the author last relieved, to the charity of the Society, or to any claim
founded on the production of a tale for _Blackwood's Magazine_, and of
two sonnets for "Friendship's Offering"; or if perchance there were any
festering sharp thorn in Mr. Harrison's side in the shape of some
distinguished radical, Sir Charles Dilke, or Mr. Dickens, or anybody who
had ever said anything against taxation, or the Post Office, or the
Court of Chancery, or the Bench of Bishops,--then would Mr. Harrison, if
he had full faith in his Chairman, cunningly arrange with him some
delicate little extinctive operation to be performed on that malignant
or that radical in the course of the evening, and would relate to us
exultingly the next day all the incidents of the power of arms, and
vindictively (for him) dwell on the barbed points and double edge of the
beautiful episcopalian repartee with which it was terminated.

11. Very seriously, in all such public duties, Mr. Harrison was a person
of rarest quality and worth; absolutely disinterested in his zeal,
unwearied in exertion, always ready, never tiresome, never absurd;
bringing practical sense, kindly discretion, and a most wholesome
element of good-humored, but incorruptible honesty, into everything his
hand found to do. Everybody respected, and the best men sincerely
regarded him, and I think those who knew most of the world were always
the first to acknowledge his fine faculty of doing exactly the right
thing to exactly the right point--and so pleasantly. In private life, he
was to me an object of quite special admiration, in the quantity of
pleasure he could take in little things; and he very materially modified
many of my gravest conclusions, as to the advantages or mischiefs of
modern suburban life. To myself scarcely any dwelling-place and duty in
this world would have appeared (until, perhaps, I had tried them) less
eligible for a man of sensitive and fanciful mind than the New Road,
Camberwell Green, and the monotonous office work in Bridge Street. And
to a certain extent, I am still of the same mind as to these matters,
and do altogether, and without doubt or hesitation, repudiate the
e