Think of what the excellent prelate would have advised, and
    bring it with you next time you come to the Club.  The porter
    will take care of it for me.

Sometimes the words will come trippingly from the pen as if they were flung out in a brilliant flash of talk, like the following sketch of human character:—­

Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture of horse-nervousness, ass-stubbornness, and camel-malice—­with an angel bobbing about unexpectedly like the apple in the posset—­and when they can do exactly as they please they are very hard to drive.

As to his conversation, that, wrote the late Wilfrid Ward,

was singularly finished and (if I may so express it) clean cut; never long-winded or prosy; enlivened by vivid illustrations.  He was an excellent raconteur, and his stories had a stamp of their own which would have made them always and everywhere acceptable.  His sense of humour and economy of words would have made it impossible, had he lived to ninety, that they should ever have been disparaged as symptoms of what has been called “anecdotage.”

Some fragments of his talk have been preserved by the same hand.  Speaking of Tennyson’s conversation, he said:  “Doric beauty is its characteristic—­perfect simplicity, without any ornament or anything artificial.”

Telling how he had been to a meeting of the British Museum Trustees, he said:  “After the meeting Archbishop Benson helped me on with my greatcoat.  I was quite overcome by this species of spiritual investiture.  ‘Thank you, Archbishop,’ I said; ’I feel as if I were receiving the pallium.’”

On another occasion he drew a distinction between two writers, with neither of whom he sympathized.  “Don’t mistake me.  One is a thinker and man of letters, the other is only a literary man.  Erasmus was a man of letters; Gigadibs a literary man.  A.B. is the incarnation of Gigadibs.  I should call him Gigadibsius Optimus Maximus.”

Of his quickness in rising to the occasion Professor Howes tells a story.  Staying after a lecture to answer questions, he turned to a student and said:  “Well, I hope you understood it all.”  “All, sir, but one part, during which you stood between me and the blackboard,” was the reply; the rejoinder:  “I did my best to make myself clear, but could not render myself transparent.”

From among my own recollections I give the following:—­“It is one of the most saddening things that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.”  Of the attitude towards Spiritualism of a certain member of the Society for Psychical Research:—­“He doesn’t believe in it, yet lends it the cover of his name.  He is one of those people who talk of the ‘possibility’ of the thing, who think the difficulties of disproving a thing as good as direct evidence in its favour.”