"What did he say to you, dear aunt?
That's what I want to know.
What did he say to you, dear aunt?
That man at Waterloo!
"An Arabian old man, a Nights old man,
As Burton, as Burton can be;
Will you ask my papa to tell my mamma
The exact words and tell them to me?"
There was another capital chaff on his "Lusiads," but I cannot find it.
With regard to flowers, he would go out and bring one little wild flower and put it in a glass of water on his table—sometimes a single leaf. If anybody gave him a bouquet, or brought hothouse or garden flowers and put them under his nose, he would turn away with disgust; and people will no doubt laugh when I tell them that it was a peculiar form of asceticism which ran like a thread (one amongst many) through his life. He learnt singing, but he found his own voice so disagreeable in song he would not go on with it, whilst his speaking voice never had its equal—so soft and deep and attractive, that every one would stop to listen as if it were a sweet-toned bell.
In music he had the finest ear, so that a false note was an agony to him; and he could fully appreciate all Eastern music and gypsy music that would sound tuneless to an English ear, and only loved the minor key. He would go to an opera to hear a new prima donna, but he could not abide amateur music, and at evenings at home, if anybody proposed a little music, and a girl got up and nervously warbled a ballad about banks and butterflies, he used to put his hand to his stomach and walk out of the room. He did not allow me to cultivate much music, but if I sang melancholy music in a minor key, in a soft low voice, he would throw open the door even while he was at work.
He was intensely simple in his tastes. I used to busy myself greatly, Martha-like, about making his room extremely comfortable; but the moment I put anything pretty in it, it used to be put in the passage. He liked large plain deal tables, about six feet long and three or four feet broad, with no table-cloth. He would tie a red bandanna on the leg for a penwiper. He liked hard wooden writing-chairs, and to have a great many of these tables—one for each separate work; a small iron bedstead, with iron wove mattress, no sheets, but plenty of English white soft warm blankets. He would have no night-light; but would never have blinds nor shutters drawn, that he might see daylight as soon as possible, and the last of the twilight. His bookshelves were all of plain deal, and each category upon which he was working, was kept separate. He would not have his books and papers touched, and preferred dust and cobwebs to their being moved. His three private rooms contained only books, swords, pistols, and guns, scientific instruments, a few medicines, and plenty of clothes. He loved his old clothes. He would order rows of greatcoats and ulsters, and then go out in a little thin coat to keep himself hardy.
He had a great love for boots, and sometimes had as many as a hundred pairs in the house. I used to implore to be allowed to give his old hats away to the cabmen, and he only laughed immensely at my getting so ashamed of them; but he always had loads of new clothes, and wore the old ones for preference. There was one rather amusing story about a fencing-shoe. He lost one, and he went and asked his bootmaker if he would make him another. He said, "No; he would make him a pair." He took this shoe all over the world, and every bootmaker he saw he asked him to make the odd shoe; but nobody ever would. At last we found out that there is a superstition amongst bootmakers that if they make one boot they die. He tried it for eighteen years and never succeeded, and I have the odd shoe now in remembrance.
He never would keep two of anything. If he had two things of a sort he gave one away, and if he became attached to any particular thing he would give it away—another asceticism—nor would he indulge in any perfume except good eau de Cologne.
With regard to food, he was very fond of what some people would call common things; but no man understood better how to order a dinner, or what to order, and how to enjoy it, especially in Paris. He used to say that French cooking and English materials and a good cellar ought to keep any man alive for a hundred years; but when he could not get these luxuries he preferred, not the demi-semi sort of table with sham entrées, but whatever food of the country the natives ate. For instance, in West Africa on the coast, everything was turtle, which abounds. In Brazil it was fejão and farinha, which fejoada was brown beans, covered with a very savoury sauce, and coarse flour (the two mixed up together are delicious); and also a kind of hot-pot, which was kept continually going. In Damascus and all Eastern places it would be kous-kous, of which he never tired, and kabábs; and in Trieste, risotto (a savoury rice dish with lumps of meat thrown about in it), polenta (yellow meal made something like a pudding with little birds in it), ravioli (Genoese paste), and so on.