“I trust the eye on the whole,” he said; “guilelessness and an unstained conscience are not really manifested either in feature or deportment, but the eye will almost always tell you true.”

His conversation, when he was in form, was, without exactly being very brilliant, very inspiring.  He had great freshness of expression, and told very few stories, and those only in illustration, never on their own merits.  He was very [Greek:  mnemonikos], or retentive—­the first requisite, says Plato, of a philosopher—­and was consequently well supplied with quotations and allusions, not slavishly repeated, but worked naturally in.  I do not mean that he passed for a good talker by skilful plagiarizing, but I found that the wider my range of reading became the more I appreciated his talk—­drawn, as it was, from all kinds of sources, and bringing with it that aroma of a far-reaching mind, the fascination that culture can bestow, the feeling that, after all, everything is interesting, and that no knowledge is unworthy of the attention of the philosopher.

He hardly ever discussed current politics, though he would argue on political principles with the greatest keenness:  neither had he accurate historical knowledge, or antiquarian; but he enjoyed listening to such talk.  For the principles, the poetic aspect, of science he had a devoted interest.  In literary matters I seldom heard his equal.  Many and many is the book which I have been induced to read solely by hearing him sketch the purport in little sentences of extraordinary felicity.  “The birth and fatal effects of Impulse in a prosaic soul,” was a sketch he gave of a celebrated novel.  On one subject he was always dumb—­Economics.  “It is the one subject on which I have never hazarded a remark successfully,” he said to me once.  “I can never appreciate the value of an economic statement; I hardly know whether it is interesting.”

As he never talked for talking’s sake, he was always ready to give his whole attention to the person he was talking to, or none at all; and consequently he never had a middle reputation—­some praising his courtesy, as an old lady with whose querulous complaints about ingratitude and rheumatism he had borne and sympathized; others, his abrupt atrocious manner—­“Turned his back on me with a scowl, and didn’t say another word,” as a sporting fast married lady said to me, who had attempted to tell him an improper story.  “I didn’t mean to offend him; young men generally like it.  I hate a young man to be a prude and a Puritan.  Why, he isn’t even going into the church, I understand!”

One of his colleagues in the school where he was a master, told me that Arthur had once given him a most delicate and pointed rebuke on the practice into which he had fallen, of appealing to a boy’s home feelings before the class.

“Some things ought to be said to people when they are alone; besides, we must not seethe the kid in his mother’s milk.”