uch respect for the
acquirements of other men to wish to impose silence on those who
were competent to speak; and he had great pleasure in listening to a
discussion on any subject in which he was interested, and on which
he was not specially informed. He never willingly monopolized the
conversation; but when called upon to take a prominent part in it,
either with one person or with several, the flow of remembered knowledge
and revived mental experience, combined with the ingenuous eagerness to
vindicate some point in dispute would often carry him away; while his
hearers, nearly as often, allowed him to proceed from absence of any
desire to interrupt him. This great mental fertility had been prepared
by the wide reading and thorough assimilation of his early days; and it
was only at a later, and in certain respects less vigorous period, that
its full bearing could be seen. His memory for passing occurrences, even
such as had impressed him, became very weak; it was so before he had
grown really old; and he would urge this fact in deprecation of any want
of kindness or sympathy, which a given act of forgetfulness might seem
to involve. He had probably always, in matters touching his own life,
the memory of feelings more than that of facts. I think this has been
described as a peculiarity of the poet-nature; and though this memory
is probably the more tenacious of the two, it is no safe guide to the
recovery of facts, still less to that of their order and significance.
Yet up to the last weeks, even the last conscious days of his life,
his remembrance of historical incident, his aptness of literary
illustration, never failed him. His dinner-table anecdotes supplied,
of course, no measure for this spontaneous reproductive power; yet some
weight must be given to the number of years during which he could
abound in such stories, and attest their constant appropriateness by not
repeating them.

This brilliant mental quality had its drawback, on which I have already
touched in a rather different connection: the obstacle which it created
to even serious and private conversation on any subject on which he was
not neutral. Feeling, imagination, and the vividness of personal points
of view, constantly thwarted the attempt at a dispassionate exchange of
ideas. But the balance often righted itself when the excitement of
the discussion was at an end; and it would even become apparent that
expressions or arguments which he had passed ove