the whole, potentially the
greatest man with whom I ever rubbed shoulders. He was a very wide,
though possibly a somewhat shallow, student; he was, without exception,
the best talker to whom I have ever listened. He possessed a certain
magnetic quality which extorted in a really extraordinary degree the
worship of thinking young men; and there was no man in his own day who
was more courageous in the expression of his beliefs, though they were
often enough likely to cost him dear. I cannot think of him as ever
having entertained an intellectual fear. He was honesty personified;
but his heart had established a curious mastery over his mind. He was
telling me one day in New Street that promiscuous charity was a curse to
the community, and that it was a man's duty to button up his pocket at
the first sound of a beggar's whine. While he was still intent upon this
moral lesson, he gave a half-crown to a mendicant Irishwoman, who did
most certainly look as if she were in need of it. The great-hearted,
big-brained, eloquent man has even yet his monument in the hearts of
those whom he inspired; but he left next to nothing as a lasting memento
of his own genius. The truth is that, when he took pen in hand, the
genial current of his soul was frozen. In print he was curiously stiff
and unimpressive; and it has been one of the wonders of my lifetime that
a man so wise, so learned, and so original should have left so faint a
trail behind him.

I suppose that really no greater stroke of luck could possibly have
befallen a student of the oddities of human nature than to have been
born in that desolate Black Country sixty years ago. Almost x everybody
was an oddity in one way or another and that defacing School Board
which has ground the lower middle class of England and its labouring
population into one common monotony had not yet laid a hand upon the
people. They spoke a very beautiful old English there, full of the
quaint plurals long since obsolete in most other places. "Shoon" and
"housen," for example, and now and then a double plural--a compromise
between the ancient manner and the new--would creep into their speech;
"eysen" was the plural of "eye," "peasen" the plural for "pea;" and the
patois was rich with many singularities which I have known often to
be quoted as "Americanisms," although, as a matter of fact, the
"Americanisms" are no more than the survival of the early English form.

If I had only had the brains to know it