he was always confident that the next would turn out to be all that he expected of it.  With the same confidence he made up his mind upon many a disputable subject; but, be it said, never without a laborious examination of the necessary data, and the acquisition of much knowledge.  In argument, of which intellectual exercise he was very fond, he was a formidable antagonist.  His power of handling masses of details and facts, of showing their inner meanings and the principles underlying them, and of making them intelligible, was very great; and very few men of his time had it in equal measure.

But the most striking feature in his conversation was his masterly application of general principles:  these he handled with extraordinary skill.  In any subject with which he was familiar, he would solve, or suggest a plausible solution of, difficulty after difficulty by immediate reference to fundamental principles.  This would give to his conclusions an appearance of inevitableness which usually overbore his adversary, and, even if it did not convince him, left him without any effective reply.  This, too, had a good deal to do, I am disposed to conjecture, with another very noticeable characteristic of his which often came out in conversation, and that was his apparently unfailing confidence in the goodness of human nature.  No man nor woman but he took to be in the main honest and truthful, and no amount of disappointment—­not even losses of money and property incurred through this faith in others’ virtues—­had the effect of altering this mental habit of his.

His intellectual interests were very widely extended, and he once confessed to me that they were agreeably stimulated by novelty and opposition.  An uphill fight in an unpopular cause, for preference a thoroughly unpopular one, or any argument in favour of a generally despised thesis, had charms for him that he could not resist.  In his later years, especially, the prospect of writing a new book, great or small, upon any one of his favourite subjects always acted upon him like a tonic, as much so as did the project of building a new house and laying out a new garden.  And in all this his sunny optimism and his unfailing confidence in his own powers went far towards securing him success.—­J.W.S.

* * * * *

“Land Nationalisation” (1882), “Bad Times” (1885), and “Darwinism” (1889) were written at Godalming, also the series of lectures which he gave in America in 1886-7 and at various towns in the British Isles.  He also continued to have examination papers[43] to correct each year—­and a very strenuous time that was.  Our mother used to assist him in this work, and also with the indexes of his books.