book, and I think
Smith and Elder would publish it." I thought my anecdotage scarcely
worthy of so much honour; but I promised to make a weekly experiment in
the _Manchester Guardian_. My _Collections and Recollections_ ran
through the year 1897, and appeared in book-form at Easter, 1898. But
Payn died on the 25th of the previous March; and the book, which I had
hoped to put in his hand, I could only inscribe to his delightful
memory.

Another remarkable man of letters, wholly remote from the world, was
Richard Holt Hutton, for thirty-six years (1861-1897) the honoured
Editor of _The Spectator_. Hutton was a "stickit minister" of the
Unitarian persuasion, who had been led, mainly by the teaching of F. D.
Maurice, to the acceptance of orthodox Christianity; and who devoted all
the rest of his life to the inculcation of what he conceived to be moral
and religious truth, through the medium of a weekly review. He lived, a
kind of married hermit, on the edge of Windsor Forest, and could hardly
be separated, even for a week's holiday, from his beloved _Spectator_.
His output of work was enormous and incessant, and was throughout
critical and didactic. The style was pre-eminently characteristic of
the man--tangled, untidy, ungraceful, disfigured by "trailing relatives"
and accumulated epithets; and yet all the time conveying the sense of
some real and even profound thought that strove to express itself
intelligibly. As the style, so the substance. "_The Spectator_," wrote
Matthew Arnold in 1865, "is all very well, but the article has Hutton's
fault of seeing so very far into a mill-stone." And, two years later,
"_The Spectator_ has an article in which Hutton shows his strange
aptitude for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick." Both were
sound criticisms. When Hutton addressed himself to a deep topic of
abstract speculation, he "saw so very far into it" that even his most
earnest admirers could not follow the visual act. When he handled the
more commonplace subjects of thought or action with which ordinary men
concern themselves, he seemed to miss the most obvious and palpable
points. He was a philosophical thinker, with a natural bent towards the
abstract and the mystical--a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian. He
saw things invisible to grosser eyes; he heard voices not audible to
ordinary ears; and, when he was once fairly launched in speculation on
such a theme as Personal Identity or the Idea of God, he "found no e