that all had not gone well.

"In the beginning," I heard him tell a religious person, "In the
beginning my mother bore me. When I was a child I was wont to bore my
mother. Now we bore each other." That this was primarily intended to
shock our friend's devotional sensibilities I do not doubt, but I
imagine it contained some small truth all the same. I think he
rather shrank from personalities, resolutely refusing even to be
photographed, hating that process with an unexampled vehemence strange
in one so modern and so versed in mechanical and chemical science.
"I!" he would rage. "What have _I_ done to merit portraiture? Have I
builded a city, or painted a masterpiece, or served my country, or
composed an iliad?" Again, "Better a single faulty _human_ effort than
the most perfect photograph ever developed."

Scanty indeed, therefore, did I find the materials with which to
fashion an introduction to this book. With the exception of one or two
pertinent fragments among his manuscripts, fragments more valuable to
a critic than a biographer, I was unrewarded. One thing, however, was
impressed upon me by my search. Here, at any rate, was a man developed
to the full. Here was a man whose culture was deep and broad, whose
body was inured to toil, whose hands and brains were employed in doing
the world's work. I have read in books vehement denials of such a
one's existence. He himself, in citing Ruskin, seemed to be sceptical
of any one man becoming a passionate thinker and a manual worker. But
I have often heard him in close converse with some old shopmate,
passing hour after hour in technical reminiscences and descriptions;
then, upon the entrance of some artist or _litterateur_, plunge into
the history of Letters or of Arts, never at a loss for authorities or
original ideas, often even illuminating intellectual problems by some
happy analogy with the problems of his trade, and rarely grounding on
either the Scylla of overbearing conceit or the Charybdis of foolish
humility.

I must insist on this fact at all events: he was not merely a clever
young man of modern ideas. "London is paved and bastioned with clever
young men," he would snarl. His aversion to the impossible type of
cultured nonentities was almost too marked. His passion for thinking
as an integral part of life placed him beyond these, among a rarer,
different class of men, the lovers of solitude. It came to view in
various ways, this fine quality of intellectual