as always heartily
welcome, and before answering the chorus of greetings, proceeded to
kiss the lady of the mansion, a queenly and handsome woman. Being
asked why he--who was a large man and very shy with respect to women,
as large men always are--should have done this thing, he answered that
the kiss had been sent by a common friend and that he had delivered it
at once, 'for if there was anything he prided himself upon it was a
courageous discharge of an unpleasant duty.'

Once when he had been narrating this incident he was asked what reply
the lady had made to so uncourteous a speech. 'I don't remember,' said
the Bibliotaph, 'it was long ago; but my opinion is that she would
have been justified in denominating me by a monosyllable beginning
with the initial letter of the alphabet and followed by successive
sibilants.'

One of the Bibliotaph's fellow book-hunters owned a chair said to have
been given by Sir Edwin Landseer to Sir Walter Scott. The chair was
interesting to behold, but the Bibliotaph after attempting to sit in
it immediately got up and declared that it was not a genuine relic:
'Sir Edwin had reason to be grateful to rather than indignant at Sir
Walter Scott.'

He said of a highly critical person that if that man were to become a
minister he would probably announce as the subject of his first
sermon: 'The conditions that God must meet in order to be acceptable
to me.' He said of a poor orator who had copyrighted one of his most
indifferent speeches, that the man 'positively suffered from an excess
of caution.' He remarked once that the great trouble with a certain
lady was 'she labored under the delusion that she enjoyed occasional
seasons of sanity.'

The _nil admirari_ attitude was one which he never affected, and he
had a contempt for men who denied to the great in literature and art
that praise which was their due. This led him to say apropos of an
obscure critic who had assailed one of the poetical masters: 'When the
Lord makes a man a fool he injures him; but when He so constitutes him
that the man is never happy unless he is making that fact public, He
insults him.'

He enjoyed speculating on the subject of marriage, especially in the
presence of those friends who unlike himself knew something about it
empirically. He delighted to tell his lady acquaintances that their
husbands would undoubtedly marry a second time if they had the chance.
It was inevitable. A man whose experience has been fo