re than daily bread, if
that,--I do say all this proves Durham to have been the noble fellow I
found him to be for years. He is long gone, like so many other friends,
to that Brighter World. His life-story in this was a touching one, as he
told it to me; and I think known to very few besides myself. In youth he
loved and was beloved; but friends and circumstances hindered; so she
married some one else who, to Durham's constant horror and indignation,
treated his wife brutally: till, one happy day, he died in some fit,
probably from his own excesses. And then--here comes the sad
climax--when Durham, having achieved fortune and fame, offered himself
to his old love, the now rich widow, she deliberately turned away with a
refusal, and broke his heart! Was it any wonder that his grief sometimes
sought the solace of voluntary forgetfulness, or that certain false
friends of his I wot of have in their teetotal Pharisaism made the evil
most of an occasional infirmity, and have blackened even with printer's
ink the memory of one of God's and Nature's true noblemen! Besides my
little daughter in marble (so charmingly asleep that, in the Royal
Academy, we heard one lady whisper to another, Hush, don't talk so loud,
you'll wake her!)--besides _that_, his _chef-d'oeuvre_, as I always
think, he modelled the bust of her father, now in the Crystal Palace
Gallery,--but would not accept any payment for it! So like Durham,--who
in many secret ways was ever generous and trying to do good: he was
always self-forgetful and only too modest. _Apropos_, I remember that
when Lord Granville asked the sculptor of Prince Albert's statue at
South Kensington "Whether the Queen, who was so well pleased, could do
anything for him"--suggestive, no doubt, of a knighthood--the dear
unselfish Durham replied, "Thank you, my Lord,--if her Majesty's
pleased, I'm satisfied." So that chance for a title was thrown
heedlessly away,--but we always called him "Sir Joe" ever after:
specially among the "Noviomagians," a band of antiquaries who used to
dine together jovially at many pretended and picturesque sites of the
undiscoverable Noviomagus, and among them I have met and numbered as my
friends Chief Baron Pollok, George Godwin, Francis Bennoch, Thomas
Wright, Thornbury and Fairholt and other noted names, some of them still
among the living.

It gave me great pleasure as a Guernseyman to have been chiefly
accessory to a duplicate in bronze of the Good Prince's st