Upper Thames, which he had tenanted since 1878. He had never been a
great traveller, dearly though he loved the north of France with its
Gothic cathedrals and 'the river bottoms with the endless poplar forests
and the green green meadows'. His tastes were very individual. Iceland
made stronger appeals to him than Greece or Rome; and even at Florence
and Venice he was longing to return to England and its homely familiar
scenes. Scotland with its bare hills, 'raw-boned' as he called it, never
gave him much pleasure; for he liked to see the earth clothed by nature
and by the hand of man. By the Upper Thames, at the foot of the
Cotswolds, the buildings of the past were still generally untouched; and
beyond the orchards and gardens, with their old-world look, lay
stretches of meadows, diversified by woods and low hills, haunted with
the song of birds; and he could believe himself still to be in the
England of Chaucer and Shakespeare. There he would always welcome the
friends whom he loved and who loved him; but to the world at large he
was a recluse. His abrupt manner, his Johnsonian utterances, would have
made him a disconcerting element in Victorian tea-parties. When provoked
by foolish utterances, he was, no less than Johnson, downright in
contradiction. There was nothing that he disliked so much as being
lionized; and there was much to annoy him when he stepped outside his
own home and circle. His last public speech was made on the abuses of
public advertisement; and in the last year of his life we hear him
growling in Ruskinian fashion that he was ever 'born with a sense of
romance and beauty in this accursed age'.

His life had been a strenuous and exhausting one, but he enjoyed it to
the last. As he said to Hyndman ten days before the end, 'It has been a
jolly good world to me when all is said, and I don't wish to leave it
yet awhile'. At least his latter years had been years of peace. He had
been freed from the stress of conflict; he had found again the joys of
youth, and could recapture the old music.

The days have slain the days, and the seasons have gone by
And brought me the summer again; and here on the grass I lie
As erst I lay and was glad, ere I meddled with right and wrong.

After an illness in 1891 he never had quite the same physical vigour,
though he continued to employ himself fully for some years in a way
which would tax the energy of many robust men. In 1895 the vital energy
was failing,