“Of course,” he said to me once, “there are times when we can only wait and hope; changing our posture, like a sick man, from time to time, to win a little ease; but when we reach a fresh standpoint, a fresh basis—­which, thank God, one does from month to month—­we are inclined to say with Albert Durer, ’It could not be better done.’”

He was very fond of the doctrine of Special Providences.

“Every now and then I have—­I suppose it is common—­what may be called a run of luck in ordinary things; I get out of scrapes in a way I don’t deserve; I find letters I have mislaid; annoyances are mysteriously shunted aside; money flows in; days of extraordinary happiness succeed one another; little events save vast complications of trouble, so that I long to turn round and grasp by the hand or kiss the cheek of the sweet friend who stands at my elbow, suggesting, ordering, providing day and night, smiling on me as I sleep, hovering around me as I work, without a word of praise.  Guardian angels! no fable.  God gives you a sudden and particular thought, and while you are independent of circumstances you master them as well.”

But such portraiture as the above is apt to get very vague and insipid unless one is able to convey a vivid picture of the man as he walked, and spoke, and lived.  The sic sedebat in Trinity College (Cambridge) chapel has given more people a thrill at the thought of Bacon than ever gained one from his books.  Personality, personal characteristics, how one craves for them!  To take a late instance, how far more impressive General Gordon’s little cane is, which he twirled in his hand as he stormed redoubts and directed an action, than a thousand pages of rhetoric about his philosophy or his views of life.

He was now, as ever, for strangers meeting him for the first time, an impressive but rather disappointing man.  He had shaved his beard, keeping only his usual moustache; his face was very spare, with a pallor that was not unhealthy.  His hair, which was dark and lay in masses, he wore generally rather long.  He had got into the way, when without his glasses, of half closing his eyes, because, as he said, it did him so little good to keep them open, as it only served to remind him of people’s presence without giving him any more definite idea of them.  He could not, for instance, unassisted, see the play of features on a face, and, for this reason, in all important interviews he wore his glasses, giving three reasons.

1.  Utilitarian—­that he could see by his opponent’s face what he was driving at, and what effect his own remarks had on him.

2.  Impressional—­it gave a man an “adventitious consequence.”

3.  Precautional—­“I show emotion quickest by the eye, and so, generally speaking, do most people; some change colour very quick; some reveal it in the mouth; but the sudden dilatation and contraction of the eye, the expression it is capable of, make it on the whole the safest guide.