ace, who had
much knowledge and experience of gardening, very cordially assisted him.
Here his characteristic energy and restlessness were conspicuously
displayed. He was always designing some new feature, some alteration in
a flower-bed, some special environment for a new plant; and always he
was confident that the new schemes would be found to have all the
perfections which the old ones lacked. From all parts of the world
botanists and collectors sent him, from time to time, rare or newly
discovered plants, bulbs, roots or seeds, which he, with the help of
Mrs. Wallace's practical skill, would try to acclimatise, and to
persuade to grow somewhere or other in his garden or conservatory.
Nothing disturbed his cheerful confidence in the future, and nothing
made him happier than some plan for reforming the house, the garden, the
kitchen-boiler, or the universe. And, truth to say, he displayed great
ingenuity in all these enterprises of reformation. Although they were
never in effect what they were expected to be by their ingenious author,
they were often sufficiently successful; but, successful or not, he was
always confident that the next would turn out to be all that he expected
of it. With the same confidence he made up his mind upon many a
disputable subject; but, be it said, never without a laborious
examination of the necessary data, and the acquisition of much
knowledge. In argument, of which intellectual exercise he was very fond,
he was a formidable antagonist. His power of handling masses of details
and facts, of showing their inner meanings and the principles underlying
them, and of making them intelligible, was very great; and very few men
of his time had it in equal measure.

But the most striking feature in his conversation was his masterly
application of general principles: these he handled with extraordinary
skill. In any subject with which he was familiar, he would solve, or
suggest a plausible solution of, difficulty after difficulty by
immediate reference to fundamental principles. This would give to his
conclusions an appearance of inevitableness which usually overbore his
adversary, and, even if it did not convince him, left him without any
effective reply. This, too, had a good deal to do, I am disposed to
conjecture, with another very noticeable characteristic of his which
often came out in conversation, and that was his apparently unfailing
confidence in the goodness of human nature. No man nor wom