h,
and from crowd to crowd, they never discover the positive joy of
life. They are like men always hungry, because their food never
digests; also, like those men, they are cross.*

[* _The Well and the Shallows_, pp. 104-5.]

There was time in the country for the food of social intercourse to
digest. I notice too that in the list of Gilbert's friends
quiet-voiced men stood high: Max Beerbohm, Jack Phillimore, Monsignor
O'Connor, Monsignor Knox, his own father, Maurice Baring: all these
represent a certain spaciousness and leisureliness which was what he
asked of friendship. Even if they were in a hurry, they never seemed
so.

Jack Phillimore both he and we saw on and off at this time but had
often to enjoy in anticipation or in retrospect. Professor, at one
time of Greek at another of Latin, at Glasgow University, he was the
kind of man Gilbert specially appreciated: he wrote of Phillimore
after his death something curiously like what he wrote of his own
father--"he was a supreme example of unadvertised greatness, and the
thing which is larger inside than outside." At Oxford Phillimore had
been known as "one of Belloc's lambs." He was very much one of the
group who were to run the _Eye-Witness_ and _New Witness_ but though
he always adored Belloc, no one who knew him in the fulness of his
powers could think of him as anyone's lamb. He was a quiet, humorous,
deeply intelligent man: a scholar of European repute, whose knowledge
of Mediaeval Latin verse equalled his Classical scholarship.

Gilbert's keen observation of his friends is never shown better than
in what he wrote of Phillimore:

Like a needle pricking a drum, his quietude seemed to kill all the
noise of our loud plutocracy and publicity. In all this he was
supremely the scholar, with not a little of the satirist.

And yet there was never any man alive who was so unlike a don. His
religion purged him of intellectual pride, and certainly of that
intellectual vanity which so often makes a sort of seething fuss
underneath the acid sociability of academic centres. He had none of
the tired omniscience which comes of intellectual breeding in and in.
He seemed to be not so much a professor as a practiser of learning.
He practised it quietly but heartily and humorously, exactly as if it
had been any other business. If he had been a sailor, like his father
the Admiral, he would have minded his own business with exactly t