There is a pensive grace about one of his last letters to the widow of the favourite brother of earlier days:—
I cannot let Christmas pass, dear Mary, without sending you a word of love and greeting from us both, to all of you of both generations. It cannot be a "merry" Christmas for any of us exactly; there is so much around that is anxious and sad, and indeed almost gloomy, and life is passing away to our juniors. But we have still much to make us thankful and even happy; and, as a whole, life to those whom it concerns, much more than to us, to most of them at least, is reasonably cheerful. At least they are young and vigorous, and have pluck to face the battle of years to come. We have little to do now but watch and sympathise, and give what little help we can.
Greg's own departure was not much longer deferred. He died in November 1881.
He was not one of the fortunate beings who can draw on a spontaneous and inexhaustible fund of geniality and high spirits. He had a craving both for stimulation and for sympathy. Hence he belonged to those who are always happier in the society of women than of men. In his case this choice was not due, as it so often is, to a love of procuring deference cheaply. It was not deference that he sought, but a sympathy that he could make sure of, and that put him at his ease. Nobody that ever lived was less of a pedant, academic don, or loud Sir Oracle. He was easy to live with, a gay and appreciative companion, and the most amiable of friends, but nothing was further from his thoughts than to pose as guide and philosopher. His conversation was particularly neat and pointed. He had a lucidity of phrase such as is more common in French society than among ourselves. The vice of small talk and the sin of prosing he was equally free from; and if he did not happen to be interested, he had a great gift of silence.
The grace of humility is one of the supreme moral attractions in a man. Its outward signs are not always directly discernible; and it may exist underneath marked intrepidity, confidence in one's own judgment, and even a strenuous push for the honours of the world. But without humility, no veracity. There is a genuine touch of it in a letter which Greg wrote to a friend who had consented to be the guardian of his children:—
I have no directions as to their education to give. I have too strong a sense of the value of religion myself, not to wish that my children should have so much of it (I speak of feeling, not of creed) as is compatible with reason. I have no ambition for them, and can only further say in the dying words of Julie, 'N'en faites point des savans—faites-en des hommes bienfaisans et justes.' If they are this, they will be more than their father ever was, and all he ever desired to be.
This sentiment of the unprofitable servant was deep in his nature—as it may well be in all who are not either blinded by inborn fatuity, or condemned by natural poverty of mind to low and gross ideals.
Though he took great delight in the enchanted land of pure literature, apart from all utility, yet he was of those, the fibres of whose nature makes it impossible for them to find real intellectual interest outside of what is of actual and present concern to their fellows. Composition, again, had to him none of the pain and travail that it brings to most writers. The expression came with the thought. His ideas were never vague, and needed no laborious translation. Along with them came apt words and the finished sentence. Yet his fluency never ran off into the fatal channels of verbosity. Ease, clearness, precision, and a certain smooth and sure-paced consecutiveness, made his written style for all purposes of statement and exposition one of the most telling and effective of his day. This gift of expression helped him always to appear intellectually at his best. It really came from a complete grasp of his own side of the case, and that always produces the best style next after a complete grasp of both sides. Few men go into the troubled region of pamphleteering, article-writing, public controversy, and incessant dialectics, without suffering a deterioration of character in consequence. Mr. Greg must be set down as one of these few. He never fell into the habitual disputant's vice of trying to elude the force of a fair argument; he did not mix up his own personality in the defence of his thesis; differences in argument and opinion produced not only no rancour, but even no soreness.
The epicurean element was undoubtedly strong in him. He liked pleasant gardens; set a high value on leisure and even vacuity; did not disdain novels; and had the sense to prefer good wine to bad. When he travelled in later life he showed none of the over-praised desire to acquire information for information's sake. While his companions were 'getting up' the Pyramids, or antiquities in the Troad, or the great tomb of Alyattis, Mr. Greg refused to take any trouble to form views, or to pretend to find a sure footing among the shifting sands of archæological or pre-historic research. He chose to lie quietly among the ruins, and let the beauty and wonder of the ancient world float silently about him. For this poetic indolence he had a great faculty. To a younger friend whom he suspected of unwholesome excess of strenuousness, he once propounded this test of mental health: 'Could you sit for a whole day on the banks of a stream, doing nothing and thinking of nothing, only throwing stones into the water?'
The ascetic view of things was wholly distasteful to him. He had a simple way of taking what was bright and enjoyable in life, refusing to allow anything but very distinct duty to interfere with the prompt acceptance of the gifts of the gods. Yet, as very seldom happens in natures thus composed, he was before all things unselfish. That is to say, he struck those who knew him best as less of a centre to himself than most other people are. Though thoroughly capable of strong and persistent wishes, and as far as possible from having a character of faint outlines and pale colours, it came to him quite naturally and without an effort to think of those for whom he cared, and of himself not at all. There was something of the child of nature in him. Though nobody liked the fruits of cultivated life better—order, neatness, and grace in all daily things—yet nobody was more ready to make short work of conventionalities that might thrust shadows between him or others and the substance of happiness.