influence for good I have ever seen.  He makes it appear unreasonable and silly to fret or fuss or fume; and yet he is shrewd and humorous, and enjoys the display of human weaknesses.  He is never shocked at anything, nor ashamed of anyone.  He likes people to follow their bent and to do things in their own way.  He never seems in the way; he loves to have children about him, and they talk to him as they talk to each other.  One has no sense of rigid morality or righteousness in his presence; it only seems the most beautiful thing in the world to be good and kind, as well as the easiest.  I do not think that he was always a very happy man; he had an anxious and rather sombre temperament.  He said to me once, laughing, that the lines: 

    “There’s not a joy the world can give
       Like those it takes away,”

were, in his experience, quite untrue, and he added that his own old age had been like a pleasant holiday to him.

It is strange to reflect how seldom such a figure of gracious age has ever been represented in a book.  I cannot recall a single instance.  In Dickens the old are generally either malignant or hypocritical, or simply imbecile; in Thackeray they are either sentimental or of the wicked fairy type, full of indomitable relish for life.  In Shakespeare they are shadowy and broken; in Wordsworth they relentlessly improve the occasion.  What one desires to see depicted is some figure that has gained in gentleness and tolerance without losing, shrewdness and perception; who is as much interested as ever in seeing the game played, without being enviously desirous to take a hand.  The thing is so perfectly beautiful when it occurs in real life that it is hard to see why it should not be represented.

XLV

I seem to remember having lately seen at the Zoo a strange and melancholy fowl, of a tortoise-shell complexion, glaring sullenly from a cage, with that curious look of age and toothlessness that eagles have, from the overlapping of the upper mandible of the beak above the lower; it was labelled the Monkey-eating Eagle.  Its food lay untasted on the floor; it much preferred, no doubt, and from no fault of its own, poor thing, a nice, plump, squalling baboon to the finest of chops without the fun!

But the name set me thinking, and brought to mind a very different kind of creature, from whom I have suffered much of late, the Eagle-eating Monkey by which I mean the writer of bad books about great people.  I had personally always supposed that I would rather read even a poor book about a real human being than the cleverest of books about imaginary people; at least I thought so till I was obliged to read a large number of memoirs and biographies, written some by stupid painstaking people, and some by clever aggravating people, about a number of celebrated persons.