Italian as readily as English; French and the modern Greek
with a little more difficulty; and could read in Greek, Latin, and
Spanish. His books were the "Meditations" of the Emperor Marcus
Aurelius, and Dante's "Divine Comedy," with the "Aeneis," Ariosto,
and some old Spanish romances next in order. I do not think he cared
greatly for any English writers but Donne and Izaak Walton, of whose
"Angler" and "Life of Sir Henry Wotton" he was inordinately fond.
In particular he admired the character of this Sir Henry Wotton,
singling him out among "the famous nations of the dead" (as Sir
Thomas Browne calls them) for a kind of posthumous friendship--nay,
almost a passion of memory. To be sure, though with more than a
hundred years between them, both had been bred at Winchester, and
both had known courts and embassies and retired from them upon
private life. . . . But who can explain friendship, even after all
the essays written upon it? Certainly to be friends with a dead man
was to my father a feat neither impossible nor absurd.

Yet he possessed two dear living friends at least in my Uncle Gervase
and Mr. Grylls, and had even dedicated a temple to their friendship.
It stood about half a mile away from the house, at the foot of the
old deer-park: a small Ionic summer-house set on a turfed slope
facing down a dell upon the Helford River. A spring of water, very
cold and pure, rose bubbling a few paces from the porch and tumbled
down the dell with a pretty chatter. Tradition said that it had once
been visited and blessed by St. Swithun, for which cause my father
called his summer-house by the saint's name, and annually on his
festival (which falls on the 15th of July) caused wine and dessert to
be carried out thither, where the three drank to their common pastime
and discoursed of it in the cool of the evening within earshot of the
lapsing water. On many other evenings they met to smoke their pipes
here, my father and Mr. Grylls playing at chequers sometimes, while
my uncle wrapped and bent, till the light failed him, new trout flies
for the next day's sport; but to keep St. Swithun's feast they never
omitted, which my father commemorated with a tablet set against the
back wall and bearing these lines--

"Peace to this house within this little wood,
Named of St. Swithun and his brotherhood
That here would meet and punctual on his day
Their heads and hands and hearts together lay.
Nor ma