of speech, and would quote what he had invented for Gladstone or Newman for years without amplifications or amendment, with what seemed a scholar's accuracy. His favourite quotations were from Newman, whom I believe he had never met, though I can remember nothing now but Newman's greeting to Johnson, "I have always considered the profession of a man of letters a third order of the priesthood!" and these quotations became so well known that at Newman's death, the editor of the Nineteenth Century asked them for publication. Because of his delight in all that was formal and arranged he objected to the public quotation of private conversation even after death, and this scruple helped his refusal. Perhaps this dreaming was made a necessity by his artificial life, but long ago when he wrote from Oxford to his very Tory but flattered family that he had stood mounted upon a library ladder in his rooms taking a book from a shelf and Gladstone about to pass the open door on his way upstairs to some college authority, had stopped, hesitated, come into the room and there spent an hour of talk. Presently it was discovered that Gladstone had not been near Oxford on the date given; yet he quoted that conversation without variation of a word until the end of his life, and I think believed in it as firmly as did his friends. These conversations were always admirable in their drama, but never too dramatic or even too polished to lose their casual accidental character; they were the phantasmagoria through which his philosophy of life found its expression. If he made his knowledge of the world out of his fantasy, his knowledge of tongues and books was certainly very great; and yet was that knowledge as great as he would have us believe. Did he really know Welsh, for instance, had he really as he told me, made his only love song, his incomparable Morfydd out of three lines in Welsh, heard sung by a woman at his door on a walking tour in Wales, or did he but wish to hide that he shared in their emotion?
"O, what are the winds?
And what are the waters?
Mine are your eyes."
He wanted us to believe that all things, his poetry with its Latin weight, his religion with its constant reference to the Fathers of the Church, or to the philosophers of the Church, almost his very courtesy were a study and achievement of the intellect. Arthur Symons'
