the secret of the various alphabetical cycles was known, perhaps, only to himself and the late Mr. Octavius Morgan. A portion of his collection was sold at Christie's in 1875, and realised prices then regarded as enormous, though since largely exceeded on the dispersal at the same rooms of the Milbank and Dunn-Gardner collections. The exhaustive article on "Plate and Plate Buyers," in the Quarterly Review (No. 282) for April 1876—the lamp at which all subsequent writers on Old English Silver have lit their torch—was from his pen.
The thorough grasp and appreciation of the subject therein displayed, the timely warnings as to forgeries, addressed to would-be buyers with long purses but little real knowledge, and the confident prediction expressed by him, and since abundantly verified, that genuine specimens of mediaeval and pre-Caroline plate (of which there were some thirty in his own collection), must greatly increase in value as their extreme rarity was better realised, render the whole article of singular interest to collectors at the present day.
With characteristic energy, although his health was now beginning to fail, he applied himself to the task of rebuilding his ruined home, and on his final retirement from the public service in 1892, he withdrew altogether from London society to end his days in the peaceful atmosphere of Windsor Forest, a neighbourhood to which both he and Delane had been strongly attached from their boyhood. His services at the Civil Service Commission are thus commemorated in the opening words of the thirty-sixth Report of that body:—
"This Commission has sustained a heavy loss owing to the
