"Cowper," he comments, "had evidently never seen a region untouched by the human hand." It goes without saying that he loved "his great namesake," as he calls him, "Robert Burton, of melancholy and merry, of facete and juvenile memory." Of contemporary work he enjoyed most the poems of D. G. Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. John Payne and FitzGerald's Rubaiyat, and we find him praising Mr. Edmund Gosse's lyrics. Of novelists Dickens was his favourite. He called Darwin "our British Aristotle." Eothen [515] was "that book of books." He never forgave Carlyle for denouncing The Arabian Nights as "downright lies" and "unwholesome literature;" Miss Martineau, as an old maid, was, of course, also out of court. If she had written Shakespeare, it would have been all the same. He enjoyed a pen and ink fight, even as in those old Richmond School days he had delighted in fisticuffs. "Peace and quiet are not in my way." And as long as he got his adversary down he was still not very particular what method he employed.
Unlike so many of his fellow-countrymen, he was a lover or art, and had visited all the galleries in Europe. "If anyone," he used to say, "thinks the English have the artistic eye, let him stand in the noblest site in Europe, Trafalgar Square, and look around." On another occasion he described the square as "the nation's last phase of artistic bathos." The facade of the National Gallery was his continual butt.
A fine handwriting, he said, bespoke the man of audacity and determination; and his own might have been done with a pin. Then he used to split his words as if they were Arabic; writing, for example, "con tradict" for contradict. When young ladies teased him to put something in their albums he generally wrote:
"Shawir hunna wa khalif hunna,"
which may be translated:
"Ask their advice, ye men of wit
And always do the opposite."
Another of his favourite sayings against women was the Persian couplet:
"Agar nek budi zan u Ray-i-Zan
Zan-ra Ma-zan nam budi, na Zan," [516]
which may be rendered:
"If good were in woman, of course it were meeter
To say when we think of her, Beat not, not Beat her."