Another of my father’s friends, whom I used to think the wisest man in the whole world, was a little old gentleman of the distinguished name of Smith, who died the other day (getting a paragraph in The Times), having devoted his whole life to a work on The Co-ordination of Knowledge. It was his simple and benign ambition to classify every scrap of knowledge since the beginning of the world’s history to the present time, by a card index system. He died, after fifty years of labor, with that task uncompleted!
I had the opportunity of meeting one character at The Whitefriars’ Club, who is still famous in Fleet Street, though he is like an ancient ghost. This was an old Shakespearian actor named O’Dell, who used to play the part of the gravedigger in “Hamlet,” and the clown in “As You Like It,” sixty years and more ago. Under the title of “The Last of the Bohemians,” he had a privileged place at the Whitefriars, which he was always the last man to leave for some unknown destination, popularly supposed to be a seat on the Thames Embankment because of his extreme penury. He wore a sombrero hat and a big black cloak in the old style of tragic actors. It was this costume and his ascetic face which led to a bet between the conductor and driver of an old horse bus passing down Fleet Street, before the time of motor cars.
“I say, Bill,” said the conductor, “who d’yer think we ’ave aboard?”
“Dunno,” said the driver.
“Cardinal Manning! S’welp me Bob!”
“No blooming fear! That ain’t the Cardinal.”
“Well, I’ll bet a tanner on it.”
At the Adelphi the conductor leaned over O’Dell as he descended with grave dignity, and said:
“Beg yer pardon, sir, but do you ’appen to be Cardinal Manning?”
“Go to hell and burn there!” said O’Dell in his sepulchral voice.