A few more fragments of his conversation have been preserved—the following by Mr. Wilfrid Ward. Speaking of Tennyson's conversation, he said:—
Doric beauty is its characteristic—perfect simplicity, without any ornament or anything artificial.
Telling how he had been to a meeting of the British Museum Trustees, he said:—]
After the meeting, Archbishop Benson helped me on with my great-coat. I was QUITE OVERCOME by this species of spiritual investiture. "Thank you, Archbishop," I said, "I feel as if I were receiving the pallium."
[Speaking of two men of letters, with neither of whom he sympathised, he once said:—]
Don't mistake me. One is a thinker and man of letters, the other is only a literary man. Erasmus was a man of letters, Gigadibs a literary man. A.B. is the incarnation of Gigadibs. I should call him Gigadibsius Optimus Maximus.
[Another time, referring to Dean Stanley's historical impressionability, as militating against his sympathies with Colenso, he said:—]
Stanley could believe in anything of which he had seen the supposed site, but was sceptical where he had not seen. At a breakfast at Monckton Milnes's, just at the time of the Colenso row, Milnes asked me my views on the Pentateuch, and I gave them. Stanley differed from me. The account of Creation in Genesis he dismissed at once as unhistorical; but the call of Abraham, and the historical narrative of the Pentateuch, he accepted. This was because he had seen Palestine—but he wasn't present at the Creation.
[When he and Stanley met, there was sure to be a brisk interchange of repartee. One of these occasions, a ballot day at the Athenaeum, has been recorded by the late Sir W.H. Flower:—
A well-known popular preacher of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, who had made himself famous by predictions of the speedy coming of the end of the world, was up for election. I was standing by Huxley when the Dean, coming straight from the ballot boxes, turned towards us.] "Well," [said Huxley], "have you been voting for C.?" ["Yes, indeed I have," replied the Dean.] "Oh, I thought the priests were always opposed to the prophets," [said Huxley.] "Ah!" replied the Dean, with that well-known twinkle in his eye, and the sweetest of smiles, "but you see, I do not believe in his prophecies, and some people say I am not much of a priest."