rfere with anyone's convenience. My servants simply adore
him, welcome him like an angel, and see him depart with tears. He knows
all about them, and keeps all the details of their families in his
mind. He never talks of himself, but has a perfectly genuine and
unaffected interest in other people. He is endlessly tolerant and
sweet-tempered; and sometimes will drop a little sweet and mellow
maxim, the ripest fruit of sunny experience. One feels in his presence
that this is what life is meant to do for us all, if it were not for
the strange admixture of irritabilities and selfishnesses, so natural
and yet so ugly, which lie in wait for so many of us. One of the most
beautiful things about him is his tenderness. He talks of his old
friends who have taken their departure before him with a perfect
simplicity, while I have seen the tears gather and suddenly overbrim
his eyes. He seems to have no personal regrets or hopes; but to have
transferred them all to other people. Yet he does not keep his friends
in mind in a professional way as a matter of duty; his thoughts are
simply full of them. He does no work, writes few letters, reads a
little; he sometimes smilingly accuses himself of being lazy; and yet
his presence and his unconscious sweetness are the most powerful
influence for good I have ever seen. He makes it appear unreasonable
and silly to fret or fuss or fume; and yet he is shrewd and humorous,
and enjoys the display of human weaknesses. He is never shocked at
anything, nor ashamed of anyone. He likes people to follow their bent
and to do things in their own way. He never seems in the way; he loves
to have children about him, and they talk to him as they talk to each
other. One has no sense of rigid morality or righteousness in his
presence; it only seems the most beautiful thing in the world to be
good and kind, as well as the easiest. I do not think that he was
always a very happy man; he had an anxious and rather sombre
temperament. He said to me once, laughing, that the lines:

"There's not a joy the world can give
Like those it takes away,"

were, in his experience, quite untrue, and he added that his own old
age had been like a pleasant holiday to him.

It is strange to reflect how seldom such a figure of gracious age has
ever been represented in a book. I cannot recall a single instance. In
Dickens the old are generally either malignant or hypocritical, or
simply imbecile; in Thackeray they are