rch of peculiarity, since the most manifold and
ever-varying types of it lie at one's very doors. And here, at the
outset, without quite endorsing the maxim that genius is always
eccentric, let it be confessed that a slight deviation from the beaten
track is generally apt to be interesting. When we see the photograph of
some distinguished artist, musician, or poet, and find the features very
like those of the pork butcher in the next street, or the footman over
the way, we are conscious of a feeling of disappointment almost
amounting to a personal grievance. Mr. Carlyle and Algernon Swinburne
satisfy us. They look as we feel graphic writers and erotic poets ought
to look. Not so the literary females who affect the compartment labelled
"For ladies only," in the reading room of the British Museum or on the
Metropolitan Railway. They are mostly like one's maiden aunts, and
savour far less of the authoress than some of the charming girls who
studiously avoid their exclusive locale, and evidently use their reading
ticket only to cover with an appearance of propriety a most unmistakable
flirtation. This they carry on sotto voce with ardent admirers of the
male sex, who, though regular frequenters of the reading room, are no
more literary than themselves. One might pick out a good many peculiar
people from that learned retreat--that poor scholar's club room; but let
us rather avoid any such byways of life, and select our peculiars from
the broad highway. Hunting there, Diogenes-wise, with one's modest
lantern, in search--not of honest--but eccentric individuals.

And first of all, having duly attended to the ladies at the outset, let
there be "Place for the Clergy." There is my dear friend the Rev. Gray
Kidds, the best fellow breathing, but, from a Diogenes point of view,
decidedly eccentric. Gray Kidds is one of those individuals whose
peculiarity it is never to have been a boy. Kidds at fifteen had
whiskers as voluminous as he now has at six-and-twenty, and as he
gambolled heavily amongst his more puerile schoolfellows, visitors to
the playground used to ask the assistant masters who that man was
playing with the boys. They evidently had an uneasy notion that a
private lunatic asylum formed a branch of the educational establishment,
and that Gray Kidds was a harmless patient allowed to join the boys in
their sports. Gray Kidds was and is literally harmless. He grew up
through school and college, innocently avoiding all those