ld never, as I think of him, have
grown into your swaggering, money-making, bargaining man of Universal
Trade. Keen and significant his policy, his ordering of his affairs must
ever have been; but the keenness and significance were the outcome, not
of any cool eye to the main chance, but of a gay sense of the pure need
of logic, not only in letters but also in living.

There, again, I touch another characteristic--his feeling for logic, for
dialectic, which made him one of the severest reasoners that it would
be possible to meet in argument. He used, in his admirably assumed air
of brag, an attitude which he could take with perfect humour and perfect
dignity--to protest that he was one of two or three Englishmen who had
ever mastered the philosophical systems of Germany, from Kant to Hegel,
from Hegel to Schopenhauer. Though he said it with an airy sense of fun,
and almost of disparagement, I am strongly inclined to believe that it
was true. He was never satisfied with his knowledge: invariably curious,
he was guided by his joy in pure reasoning to the philosophies of the
world, and in his silent, quiet, unobtrusive way he became a master of
many subjects which life was too brief in his case to permit him to show
to his friends, much less to the world.

This, it will be readily understood, is, as I have said, the merest
summary of a character, as one person has understood it. Others will
reach him from other points of view. Meanwhile Ladysmith has him--what
is that phrase of his?--"You squirm between iron fingers." Fortunate he,
so far that he is at rest, squirming no longer; and with the wail on his
lips, the catch in the throat, he went down in the embrace of a deadlier
enemy than the Bulwan horror, to which he made reference in one of the
last lines he was destined to write in this world. He fell ill in that
pestilent town, as all the world knows. His constitution was strong
enough; he had not lived a life of unpropitious preparation for a
serious illness; but his heart was a danger. Typhoid is fatal to any
heart-weakness, particularly in convalescence; and he was caught
suddenly as he was growing towards perfect health.

I have been privileged to see certain letters written to his wife by the
friend with whom he shared his Ladysmith house during the course of his
illness. "How he contracted enteric fever," says Mr Maud, "I cannot
tell. It is unfortunately very prevalent in the camp just now. He began
to be ill on