risk and loss were equitably as much, mine as his,—­and further that the young sculptor had little more than daily bread, if that,—­I do say all this proves Durham to have been the noble fellow I found him to be for years.  He is long gone, like so many other friends, to that Brighter World.  His life-story in this was a touching one, as he told it to me; and I think known to very few besides myself.  In youth he loved and was beloved; but friends and circumstances hindered; so she married some one else who, to Durham’s constant horror and indignation, treated his wife brutally:  till, one happy day, he died in some fit, probably from his own excesses.  And then—­here comes the sad climax—­when Durham, having achieved fortune and fame, offered himself to his old love, the now rich widow, she deliberately turned away with a refusal, and broke his heart!  Was it any wonder that his grief sometimes sought the solace of voluntary forgetfulness, or that certain false friends of his I wot of have in their teetotal Pharisaism made the evil most of an occasional infirmity, and have blackened even with printer’s ink the memory of one of God’s and Nature’s true noblemen!  Besides my little daughter in marble (so charmingly asleep that, in the Royal Academy, we heard one lady whisper to another, Hush, don’t talk so loud, you’ll wake her!)—­besides that, his chef-d’oeuvre, as I always think, he modelled the bust of her father, now in the Crystal Palace Gallery,—­but would not accept any payment for it!  So like Durham,—­who in many secret ways was ever generous and trying to do good:  he was always self-forgetful and only too modest. Apropos, I remember that when Lord Granville asked the sculptor of Prince Albert’s statue at South Kensington “Whether the Queen, who was so well pleased, could do anything for him”—­suggestive, no doubt, of a knighthood—­the dear unselfish Durham replied, “Thank you, my Lord,—­if her Majesty’s pleased, I’m satisfied.”  So that chance for a title was thrown heedlessly away,—­but we always called him “Sir Joe” ever after:  specially among the “Noviomagians,” a band of antiquaries who used to dine together jovially at many pretended and picturesque sites of the undiscoverable Noviomagus, and among them I have met and numbered as my friends Chief Baron Pollok, George Godwin, Francis Bennoch, Thomas Wright, Thornbury and Fairholt and other noted names, some of them still among the living.

It gave me great pleasure as a Guernseyman to have been chiefly accessory to a duplicate in bronze of the Good Prince’s statue by Durham being set up at the Pierhead of St. Peter’s Port.  Interest was exerted by me to get royal permission for a new cast from the original, Government giving the metal of old cannons; a collection from house to house was made throughout the island, granite to any extent was on the spot, meetings were held, and I had the pleasure to see Durham’s grand work inaugurated there, and to find him welcomed by all the “Sixties”—­ay, and the “Forties” too—­with the hospitality for which Sarnia was in those days proverbial.