was an obstacle to any sense of ease in his presence.  I seem to recollect that instead of being brought up, as most stammerers are, by a consonant, it took the form with Shorthouse of repeating the word “Too—­too” over and over again until the barrier was surmounted; and in order to help himself out, he pulled at his whiskers alternately, with a motion as though he were milking a cow.  Some years after I saw him again; he was then paler and more worn of aspect.  He had discarded his whiskers, and had grown a pointed beard.  He was a distinguished-looking man now, whereas formerly he had only been an impressive-looking one.  I do not remember that his stammer was nearly so apparent, and he had far more assurance and dignity, which had come, I suppose, from his having been welcomed and sought after by all kinds of eminent people, and from having found that eminent people were very much like any other people, except that they were more simple and more interesting.  I was still conscious of his great kindness and courtesy, a courtesy distributed with perfect impartiality.

But the mystery about him is this.  The Life reveals, or seems to reveal, a very commonplace man, cultivated, religious, “decent not to fail in offices of tenderness” like Telemachus, but for all that essentially parochial.  His letters are heavy, uninteresting, banal, and reveal little except a very shaky taste in literature.  The Essays which are reproduced, which he wrote for Birmingham literary societies, are of the same quality, serious, ordinary, prosaic, mildly ethical.

Yet behind all this, this pious, conscientious man of business contrived to develop a style of quite extraordinary fineness, lucid, beauty-haunted, delicate and profound. John Inglesant is not a wholly artistic hook, because it is ill-proportioned and the structure is weak—­the middle is not in the centre, and it leaves off, not because the writer appears to have come to the end, but because it could not well be longer.  There is no balance of episodes.  It has just the sort of faults that a book might be expected to have which was written at long intervals and not on any very carefully conceived plan.  It looks as if Shorthouse had just taken a pen and a piece of paper and had begun to write.  Yet the phrasing, the cadence, the melody of the book are exquisite.  I do not think he ever reached the same level again, though his other books are full of beautiful passages, except perhaps in the little introduction to an edition of George Herbert, which is a wonderfully attractive piece of writing.

Shorthouse had an extraordinary gift for evoking a certain sort of ecclesiastical scene, a chapel buried in spring-woods, seen in the clear and fresh light of the early morning, the fragrant air, with perhaps a hint of dewy chilliness about it, stealing in and swaying the flames of the lighted tapers, made ghostlike and dusky by the touch of dawn; the priest, solemnly vested, moves about with a quiet deliberateness, and the words of the Eucharist seem to fall on the ear with a soft and delicate precision, as from the lips of one who is discharging a task of almost overwhelming sweetness, to which he consecrates the early purity of the awakening day.