th Shorthouse of repeating the word
"Too--too" over and over again until the barrier was surmounted; and in
order to help himself out, he pulled at his whiskers alternately, with
a motion as though he were milking a cow. Some years after I saw him
again; he was then paler and more worn of aspect. He had discarded his
whiskers, and had grown a pointed beard. He was a distinguished-looking
man now, whereas formerly he had only been an impressive-looking one. I
do not remember that his stammer was nearly so apparent, and he had far
more assurance and dignity, which had come, I suppose, from his having
been welcomed and sought after by all kinds of eminent people, and from
having found that eminent people were very much like any other people,
except that they were more simple and more interesting. I was still
conscious of his great kindness and courtesy, a courtesy distributed
with perfect impartiality.

But the mystery about him is this. The _Life_ reveals, or seems to
reveal, a very commonplace man, cultivated, religious, "decent not to
fail in offices of tenderness" like Telemachus, but for all that
essentially parochial. His letters are heavy, uninteresting, banal,
and reveal little except a very shaky taste in literature. The _Essays_
which are reproduced, which he wrote for Birmingham literary societies,
are of the same quality, serious, ordinary, prosaic, mildly ethical.

Yet behind all this, this pious, conscientious man of business
contrived to develop a style of quite extraordinary fineness, lucid,
beauty-haunted, delicate and profound. _John Inglesant_ is not a
wholly artistic hook, because it is ill-proportioned and the structure
is weak--the middle is not in the centre, and it leaves off, not
because the writer appears to have come to the end, but because it
could not well be longer. There is no balance of episodes. It has just
the sort of faults that a book might be expected to have which was
written at long intervals and not on any very carefully conceived plan.
It looks as if Shorthouse had just taken a pen and a piece of paper and
had begun to write. Yet the phrasing, the cadence, the melody of the
book are exquisite. I do not think he ever reached the same level
again, though his other books are full of beautiful passages, except
perhaps in the little introduction to an edition of George Herbert,
which is a wonderfully attractive piece of writing.

Shorthouse had an extraordinary gift for evoking a certa