tolerable if it were not for its amusements."

But even this did not exhaust the Sterling Club. There was another
scholar, Malden, who should have been mentioned with the group above;
the second Sir Frederick Pollock, who wrote too little but left an
excellent translation of Dante, besides some reminiscences and other
work; Philip Pusey, elder brother of the theologian, and a man of
remarkable ability; James Spedding, who devoted almost the whole of his
literary life to the study, championship, and editing of Bacon, but left
other essays and reviews of great merit; Twisleton, who undertook with
singular patience and shrewdness the solution of literary and historical
problems like the Junius question and that of the African martyrs; and
lastly George Stovin Venables, who for some five and thirty years was
the main pillar in political writing of the _Saturday Review_, was a
parliamentary lawyer of great diligence and success, and combined a
singularly exact and wide knowledge of books and men in politics and
literature with a keen judgment, an admirably forcible if somewhat
mannered style, a disposition far more kindly than the world was apt to
credit him with, and a famous power of conversation. All these men,
almost without exception, were more or less contributors to periodicals;
and it may certainly be said that, but for periodicals, it is rather
unlikely that some of them would have contributed to literature at all.

Not as a member of the Sterling Club, but as the intimate friend of all
its greatest members, as a contributor, though a rather unfrequent one,
to papers, and as a writer of singular and extraordinary quality but
difficult to class under a more precise head, may be noticed Edward
FitzGerald, who, long a recluse, unstintedly admired by his friends but
quite unknown to the public, became famous late in life by his
translation of Omar Khayyam, and familiar somewhat after his death
through the publication of his charming letters by Mr. Aldis Wright. He
was born on 31st March 1809, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, the
neighbourhood which was his headquarters for almost his entire life,
till his death on a visit to a grandson of the poet Crabbe at Merton in
Norfolk, 14th June 1883. He went to school at Bury, and thence to
Cambridge, where he laid the foundation of his acquaintance with the
famous Trinity set of 1825-30. But on taking his degree in the last
named year and leaving college, he took to no profession, b