etc.  I have a very distinct recollection of calling upon him in Myddelton Square at the time when I was living close to him in Percy Circus.  Books were piled up from floor to ceiling, apparently in great confusion, but he seemed to remember where to find every book and what there was in it.  It is a singular fact that the only person outside those I have mentioned who seems to have known him was that brilliant but eccentric journalist, Thomas Purnell, who had an immense opinion of him and used to call him ‘the scholar.’  How Purnell managed to break through the icy wall that surrounded the recluse always puzzled me; but I suppose they must have come across one another at one of those pleasant inns in the north of London where ‘the scholar’ was taking his chop and bottle of Beaune.  He was a man that never made new friends, and as one after another of his old friends died he was left so entirely alone that, I think, he saw no one except Mr. Swinburne, the author of Aylwin, and myself.  But at Christmas he always spent a week at ‘The Pines,’ when and where my father and I used to meet him.  His memory was so powerful that he seemed to be able to recall not only all that he had read, but the very conversations in which he had taken a part.  He died, I think, at a little over eighty, and his faculties up to the last were exactly like those of a man in the prime of life.  He always reminded me of Charles Lamb’s description of George Dyer.

Such is my outside picture of this extraordinary man; and it is only of externals that I am free to speak here, even if I were competent to touch upon his inner life.  He was a still greater recluse than the ‘Philip Aylwin’ of the novel.  I think I am right in saying that he took up one or two Oriental tongues when he was seventy years of age.  Another of his passions was numismatics, and it was in these studies that he sympathized with the author of Aylwin’s friend, the late Lord de Tabley.  I remember one story of his peculiarities which will give an idea of the kind of man he was.  He had a brother who was the exact opposite of him in every way—­strikingly good-looking, with great charm of mariner and savoir faire, but with an ordinary intellect and a very superficial knowledge of literature, or, indeed, anything else, except records of British military and naval exploits—­where he was really learned.  Being full of admiration of his student brother, and having a parrot-like instinct for mimicry, he used to talk with great volubility upon all kinds of subjects wherever he went, and repeat in the same words what he had been listening to from his brother, until at last he got to be called the ‘walking encyclopedia.’  The result was that he got the reputation of being a great reader and an original thinker, while the true student and book-lover was frequently complimented on the way in which he took after his learned brother.  This did not in the least annoy the real student, it simply amused him, and he would give with a dry humour most amusing stories as to what people had said to him on this subject.