take him so seriously. And here I would remark in parenthesis, that
trivial surface insincerities, such as we have had glimpses of in his
dealings, do not affect such a great organic sincerity as I am speaking
of. They are excrescences, which the great central health will sooner or
later clear away. It was because he never held an opinion to which he
was not, when called upon, practically faithful; never dreamed a dream
without at once setting about its translation into daylight; never
professed a creed for a week without some essay after the realisation of
its new ideal; it was because he had the power and the courage to glow
mightily, and to some purpose; because his life had a fiery centre,
which his eyes were not afraid of revealing--that I speak of his great
sincerity, a great capacity for intense life. Shallow patterers of
divine creeds were, therefore, most abhorrent to him. 'You must excuse
me, sir,' I remember his once saying to such a one, 'but what are you
doing with cigarette and salutaris? If I held such a belief as yours, I
would stand sandalled, with a rope round my waist, before to-morrow.'

One quaint instance of this earnest attitude in all things occurs to me
out of his schooldays. He was a Divine Right man, a fiery Jacobite, in
those days; and, probably not without some absurd unconfessed dream in
his heart that it might somehow help the dead old cause, he one
afternoon fluttered the Hanoverian hearts--all the men we meet in street
and mart are Hanoverians, of course--of our little literary club by
solemnly rising 'to give notice' that at the following meeting he would
read a paper to prove that 'the House of Hanover has no right to the
English throne.' Great was the excitement through the fortnight
intervening, extending even to the masters; and the meeting was a full
one, and no little stormy.

Narcissus rose with the air of a condemned Strafford, and with all his