and how she came along the bridge in the Sonnambula; and you feel the tenderness in his tone, as of a positive love for her whose voice seems still ringing through him as he talks.  I have noticed exactly the same phenomenon when people who knew Mr. Brookfield hear his name mentioned in casual conversation.  “Ah!  Brookfield!  Yes; there never was any one quite like him!” And off they go, with visible pleasure and genuine emotion, to describe the inimitable charm, the touch of genius which brought humorous delight out of the commonest incidents, the tinge of brooding melancholy which threw the flashing fun into such high relief.

Not soon will fade from the memory of any who ever heard it the history of the examination at the ladies’ school, where Brookfield, who had thought that he was only expected to examine in languages and literature, found himself required to set a paper in physical science.  “What was I to do?  I know nothing about hydrogen or oxygen or any other ‘gen.’  So I set them a paper in common sense, or what I called ’Applied Science.’  One of my questions was, ’What would you do to cure a cold in the head?’ One young lady answered, ’I should put my feet in hot mustard and water till you were in a profuse perspiration.’  Another said, ’I should put him to bed, give him a soothing drink, and sit by him till he was better.’  But, on reconsideration, she ran her pen through all the ‘him’s’ and ‘he’s,’ and substituted ‘her’ and ‘she.’”

Mr. Brookfield was during the greater part of his life a hard-working servant of the public, and his friends could only obtain his delightful company in the rare and scanty intervals of school-inspecting—­a profession of which not even the leisure is leisurely.  The type of the French abbe, whose sacerdotal avocations lay completely in the background and who could give the best hours of the day and night to the pleasures or duties of society, was best represented in our day by the Rev. William Harness and the Rev. Henry White.  Mr. Harness was a diner-out of the first water; an author and a critic; perhaps the best Shakespearean scholar of his time; and a recognized and even dreaded authority on all matters connected with the art and literature of the drama.  Mr. White, burdened only with the sinecure chaplaincies of the Savoy and the House of Commons, took the Theatre as his parish, mediated with the happiest tact between the Church and the Stage, and pronounced a genial benediction over the famous suppers in Stratton Street at which an enthusiastic patroness used to entertain Sir Henry Irving when the public labours of the Lyceum were ended for the night.