I wondered, as I stood by the
grave, if, were I the schoolmaster, I would stop the game just for the
few minutes during which a body was committed to the earth; and I
decided that I would not. In the midst of death we are in life, just
as in the midst of life we are in death; it is all as it should be in
this bizarre, jostling world. And he whom we had come to bury would
have been the first to wish the boys to go on with their sport.

He was an old scholar--not so very old, either--whom I had known for
some five years, and had many a long walk with: a short and sturdy
Irish gentleman, with a large, genial grey head stored with odd lore
and the best literature; and the heart of a child. I never knew a man
of so transparent a character. He showed you all his thoughts: as some
one once said, his brain was like a beehive under glass--you could
watch all its workings. And the honey in it! To walk with him at any
season of the year was to be reminded or newly told of the best that
the English poets have said on all the phenomena of wood and hedgerow,
meadow and sky. He had the more lyrical passages of Shakespeare at his
tongue's end, and all Wordsworth and Keats. These were his favourites;
but he had read everything that has the true rapturous note, and had
forgotten none of its spirit.

His life was divided between his books, his friends, and long walks. A
solitary man, he worked at all hours without much method, and probably
courted his fatal illness in this way. To his own name there is not
much to show; but such was his liberality that he was continually
helping others, and the fruits of his erudition are widely scattered,
and have gone to increase many a comparative stranger's reputation.
His own _magnum opus_ he left unfinished; he had worked at it for
years, until to his friends it had come to be something of a joke. But
though still shapeless, it was a great feast, as the world, I hope,
will one day know. If, however, this treasure does not reach the
world, it will not be because its worth was insufficient, but because
no one can be found to decipher the manuscript; for I may say
incidentally that our old friend wrote the worst hand in London, and
it was not an uncommon experience of his correspondents to carry his
missives from one pair of eyes to another, seeking a clue; and I
remember on one occasion two such inquirers meeting unexpectedly, and
each simultaneously drawing a letter from his pocket and uttering the