I am, Sir, yours, &c.,
LL.D.
He was always ready to listen to what younger men (and women) had to say, to talk to them about his own subjects, his own work, to draw out their abilities, to discuss their difficulties. What Mr. Lionel Tollemache has written of Professor Owen is not less applicable to him:
'His innate modesty enabled him, when speaking upon his own subject, so to let himself down to the level of the ordinary listeners that they not only felt quite at their ease with him, but fancied for the moment that they were experts like himself.'
Journal, Jan. 1888.—Met Mr. Burne-Jones at the Humphry Wards', and had much interesting talk anent Rossetti. Burne-Jones said Rossetti was like an emperor; his voice was that of a king who could quell his subjects. Also that he had a wonderful memory for metre, but that Swinburne's is better still, inasmuch as he can remember prose. On one occasion Swinburne recited to Burne-Jones several pages of Milton's prose which he had read once twenty years previously. Burne-Jones went on to say that Rossetti worked a great deal at his poetry, and added, 'That's what you can do with words, worry them as much as you like, but you can't tease a picture.'
March 9.—Mr. Leslie Stephen lectured on Coleridge most admirably.
To Miss C. E. Romanes.
18 Cornwall Terrace: March 1, 1888.
My dearest Charlotte,—I find that neither of us wrote yesterday, so I have two of your letters to answer to-day.
You certainly seem to be having much the best time of it as regards weather. Every week and every day here is worse than the last—the month which has just ended having been the most savage February in the memory of living Londoners. You will have seen that poor Cotter Morison has not survived it. He died last Sunday, just too soon to see his son, who had been telegraphed home from India. He had a great desire to live long enough to have had this meeting, and it seems hard that when he struggled on so long and painfully at the end, that he should just have missed it.