m they loved. Do not fear, therefore. I do not tell you that
your friend will not change, but as I am sure that her choice cannot be
that of a man with a base ideal, so I am sure the change will be a safe
and a good one. Do not fear that anything you love will vanish--he must
love it too."

Among other introductions in London, Fleeming had presented a letter
from Mrs. Gaskell to the Alfred Austins. This was a family certain to
interest a thoughtful young man. Alfred, the youngest and least known of
the Austins, had been a beautiful golden-haired child, petted and kept
out of the way of both sport and study by a partial mother. Bred an
attorney, he had (like both his brothers) changed his way of life, and
was called to the Bar when past thirty. A Commission of Inquiry into the
state of the poor in Dorsetshire gave him an opportunity of proving his
true talents; and he was appointed a Poor Law Inspector, first at
Worcester, next at Manchester, where he had to deal with the potato
famine and the Irish immigration of the 'forties, and finally in London,
where he again distinguished himself during an epidemic of cholera. He
was then advanced to the Permanent Secretaryship of Her Majesty's Office
of Works and Public Buildings; a position which he filled with perfect
competence, but with an extreme of modesty; and on his retirement, in
1868, he was made a Companion of the Bath. While apprentice to a Norwich
attorney, Alfred Austin was a frequent visitor in the house of Mr.
Barren, a rallying-place in those days of intellectual society. Edward
Barren, the son of a rich saddler or leather merchant in the Borough,
was a man typical of the time. When he was a child, he had once been
patted on the head in his father's shop by no less a man than Samuel
Johnson, as the Doctor went round the Borough canvassing for Mr. Thrale;
and the child was true to this early consecration. "A life of lettered
ease spent in provincial retirement," it is thus that the biographer of
that remarkable man, William Taylor, announces his subject; and the
phrase is equally descriptive of the life of Edward Barron. The pair
were close friends: "W. T. and a pipe render everything agreeable,"
writes Barron in his diary in 1828; and in 1833, after Barron had moved
to London, and Taylor had tasted the first public failure of his powers,
the latter wrote: "To my ever dearest Mr. Barron say, if you please,
that I miss him more than I regret him--that I acquiesce in