or divide! I
am a gluttonous reader, and only write from time to time."

He was really composing more actively than he himself realised. About
this time he wrote:--

"Just now I am busy trying to whitewash Lord Hertford--not the
Marquess of Steyne, that would be impossible--but the unhappy
hypochondriac recluse of the Rue Lafitte, who I believe has been
most malignantly traduced by the third-rate English Colony in
Paris--all his faults exaggerated, none of his good qualities even
hinted at. The good British public has so long been used to look
upon him as a minotaur that it will perhaps startle and amuse it to
be told that he had many admirable points."

At the beginning of last year the aspect of Lord Redesdale was very
remarkable. He had settled down into his life at Batsford, diversified
by the frequent dashes to London. His years seemed to sit upon him more
lightly than ever. His azure eyes, his curled white head thrown back,
the almost jaunty carriage of his well-kept figure, were the external
symbols of an inner man perpetually fresh, ready for adventure and
delighted with the pageant of existence. He found no fault at all with
life, save that it must leave him, and he had squared his shoulders not
to give way to weakness. Perhaps the only sign of weakness was just that
visible determination to be strong. But the features of his character
had none of those mental wrinkles, those "rides de l'esprit," which
Montaigne describes as proper to old age. Lord Redesdale was guiltless
of the old man's self-absorption or exclusive interest in the past. His
curiosity and sympathy were vividly exhibited to his friends, and so, in
spite of his amusing violence in denouncing his own forgetfulness, was
his memory of passing events. In the petulance of his optimism he was
like a lad.

There was no change in the early part of last year, although it was
manifest that the incessant journeying between Batsford and London
exhausted him. The garden occupied him more and more, and he was
distracted by the great storm of the end of March, which blew down and
destroyed at the head of the bridge the wonderful group of cypresses,
which he called "the pride of my old age." But, after a gesture of
despair, he set himself energetically to repair the damage. He was in
his usual buoyant health when the very hot spell in May tempted him out
on May 18th, with his agent, Mr. Kennedy, to fish at Swinbr