s of
Mankind_, to which it stands in the same relation among English books
as the Racing Calendar does to those of Horsekind. He is a very
intelligent, accomplished person. We had also there the Dean; a certain
Dr. ---- of Corpus College, Cambridge (a booby); and a clever fellow,
a Mr. Fisher, one of the Tutors of Trinity in my days. We had a very
pleasant evening."--

At London we were in the habit of expecting Sterling pretty often; his
presence, in this house as in others, was looked for, once in the month
or two, and came always as sunshine in the gray weather to me and mine.
My daily walks with him had long since been cut short without renewal;
that walk to Eltham and Edgeworth's perhaps the last of the kind he and
I had: but our intimacy, deepening and widening year after year, knew no
interruption or abatement of increase; an honest, frank and truly human
mutual relation, valuable or even invaluable to both parties, and a
lasting loss, hardly to be replaced in this world, to the survivor of
the two.

His visits, which were usually of two or three days, were always full of
business, rapid in movement as all his life was. To me, if possible, he
would come in the evening; a whole cornucopia of talk and speculation
was to be discharged. If the evening would not do, and my affairs
otherwise permitted, I had to mount into cabs with him; fly far and
wide, shuttling athwart the big Babel, wherever his calls and pauses had
to be. This was his way to husband time! Our talk, in such straitened
circumstances, was loud or low as the circumambient groaning rage
of wheels and sound prescribed,--very loud it had to be in such
thoroughfares as London Bridge and Cheapside; but except while he
was absent, off for minutes into some banker's office, lawyer's,
stationer's, haberdasher's or what office there might be, it never
paused. In this way extensive strange dialogues were carried on: to me
also very strange,--private friendly colloquies, on all manner of rich
subjects, held thus amid the chaotic roar of things. Sterling was full
of speculations, observations and bright sallies; vividly awake to what
was passing in the world; glanced pertinently with victorious clearness,
without spleen, though often enough with a dash of mockery, into its
Puseyisms, Liberalisms, literary Lionisms, or what else the mad hour
might be producing,--always prompt to recognize what grain of sanity
might be in the same. He was opulent in talk, and the