For here it is not a question of mere brilliance of
style. The result is due to patience, penetration, and the careful
weighing of evidence, joined to that faculty of realising things in
the concrete by which a picture is conjured up out of a mass of
phenomena, everything falling into its place under laws which seem to
prove themselves as soon as they are stated.

Of his style nothing need be said, for his readers have felt its
charm. But it deserves to be remarked that this accomplished master of
words had little verbal memory. He used to say that he could never
recollect a phrase in its exact form, and in his books he often
unconsciously varied, writing from memory, some expression whose
precise form is on record. Nor had he any turn for languages. German
he knew scarcely at all, a fact which makes the range of his
historical knowledge appear more striking; and though he had spent
several winters in Italy, he could not speak Italian except so far as
he needed it for the inn or the railway. The want of mere verbal
memory partly accounts for this deficiency, but it was not unconnected
with the vehemence of his interest in the substance of things. He was
so anxious to get at the kernel that he could not stop to examine the
nut. In this absence of linguistic gifts, as well as in the keenness
of his observation (and in his shortsightedness), he resembled Dean
Stanley, who, though he had travelled in and brought back all that was
best worth knowing from every country in Europe, had no facility in
any language but his own.

Green was not one of those whose personality is unlike their books,
for there was in both the same fertility, the same vivacity, the
same quickness of sympathy. Nevertheless, his conversation seemed to
give an even higher impression of intellectual power than did his
writings, because it was so swift and so spontaneous. Such talk has
rarely been heard in our time, so gay was it, so vivid, so various,
so full of anecdote and illustration, so acute in criticism, so
candid in consideration, so graphic in description, so abundant in
sympathy, so flashing in insight, so full of colour and emotion as
well as of knowledge and thought. One had to forbid one's self to
visit him in the evening, because it was impossible to get away before
two o'clock in the morning. And, unlike many famous talkers, he was
just as willing to listen as to speak. One of the charms of his
company was that it made a man feel better th