y of mind to low and gross ideals.

Though he took great delight in the enchanted land of pure literature,
apart from all utility, yet he was of those, the fibres of whose nature
makes it impossible for them to find real intellectual interest outside
of what is of actual and present concern to their fellows. Composition,
again, had to him none of the pain and travail that it brings to most
writers. The expression came with the thought. His ideas were never
vague, and needed no laborious translation. Along with them came apt
words and the finished sentence. Yet his fluency never ran off into the
fatal channels of verbosity. Ease, clearness, precision, and a certain
smooth and sure-paced consecutiveness, made his written style for all
purposes of statement and exposition one of the most telling and
effective of his day. This gift of expression helped him always to
appear intellectually at his best. It really came from a complete grasp
of his own side of the case, and that always produces the best style
next after a complete grasp of both sides. Few men go into the troubled
region of pamphleteering, article-writing, public controversy, and
incessant dialectics, without suffering a deterioration of character in
consequence. Mr. Greg must be set down as one of these few. He never
fell into the habitual disputant's vice of trying to elude the force of
a fair argument; he did not mix up his own personality in the defence of
his thesis; differences in argument and opinion produced not only no
rancour, but even no soreness.

The epicurean element was undoubtedly strong in him. He liked pleasant
gardens; set a high value on leisure and even vacuity; did not disdain
novels; and had the sense to prefer good wine to bad. When he travelled
in later life he showed none of the over-praised desire to acquire
information for information's sake. While his companions were 'getting
up' the Pyramids, or antiquities in the Troad, or the great tomb of
Alyattis, Mr. Greg refused to take any trouble to form views, or to
pretend to find a sure footing among the shifting sands of archaeological
or pre-historic research. He chose to lie quietly among the ruins, and
let the beauty and wonder of the ancient world float silently about him.
For this poetic indolence he had a great faculty. To a younger friend
whom he suspected of unwholesome excess of strenuousness, he once
propounded this test of mental health: 'Could you sit for a whole day on
the