e antagonistic forces in
the Doric order; in Fleeming they were plain enough; and the Bobadil of
these affairs with Dr. Bell was still, like the corrector of Italian
consuls, "a great child in everything but information." At the house of
Colonel Cleather, he might be seen with a family of children; and with
these there was no word of the Greek orders; with these Fleeming was
only an uproarious boy and an entertaining draughtsman; so that his
coming was the signal for the young people to troop into the playroom,
where sometimes the roof rang with romping, and sometimes they gathered
quietly about him as he amused them with his pencil.

In another Manchester family, whose name will be familiar to my
readers--that of the Gaskells,--Fleeming was a frequent visitor. To Mrs.
Gaskell he would often bring his new ideas, a process that many of his
later friends will understand and, in their own cases, remember. With
the girls he had "constant fierce wrangles," forcing them to reason out
their thoughts and to explain their prepossessions; and I hear from Miss
Gaskell that they used to wonder how he could throw all the ardour of
his character into the smallest matters, and to admire his unselfish
devotion to his parents. Of one of these wrangles I have found a record
most characteristic of the man. Fleeming had been laying down his
doctrine that the end justifies the means, and that it is quite right
"to boast of your six men-servants to a burglar, or to steal a knife to
prevent a murder"; and the Miss Gaskells, with girlish loyalty to what
is current, had rejected the heresy with indignation. From such
passages-at-arms many retire mortified and ruffled; but Fleeming had no
sooner left the house than he fell into delighted admiration of the
spirit of his adversaries. From that it was but a step to ask himself
"what truth was sticking in their heads"; for even the falsest form of
words (in Fleeming's life-long opinion) reposed upon some truth, just as
he could "not even allow that people admire ugly things, they admire
what is pretty in the ugly thing." And before he sat down to write his
letter, he thought he had hit upon the explanation. "I fancy the true
idea," he wrote, "is that you must never do yourself or any one else a
moral injury--make any man a thief or a liar--for any end"; quite a
different thing, as he would have loved to point out, from never
stealing or lying. But this perfervid disputant was not always out of
key w