and brought to an untimely close by the ravages of a fatal and insidious malady-such are, in brief, the outlines of a career which in itself would seem to possess but scanty claims upon the attention of the general observer. But if the incidents of Calverley's life were thus trite even to commonplace, yet his own bearing amongst them, and the physical and intellectual personality which marked each successive stage, would be found, if accurately and adequately portrayed, to present a striking and an interesting picture. From childhood up there never was a time when he failed to impress in some enduring manner those amongst whom he moved. His boyhood was distinguished by feats of physical activity and daring, which almost eclipsed his marvellous precocity of mind, and some of which have already passed into the region of myth and tradition.

At a later period, though he was still remarkable for bodily strength and agility, it was the exceptional quality of his intellect which fascinated and enchained his associates. And as to this, there can be but one verdict amongst all who were even slightly acquainted with him. As an intellectual organism of the rarest and subtlest fibre, he stood altogether apart from his contemporaries. And this not by virtue of any predominant excellence in one or other of the acknowledged lines in which men of talent or of genius show themselves above their fellows. Brilliant and incisive in speech, sparkling with epigrams, he was still neither a great talker nor a professed wit; capable of reasoning closely, he neither sought nor achieved reputation in debate; nor could he at any time have claimed precedence upon the score of acquired knowledge. Yet those who consorted with him derived from his conversation an impression which the most accomplished and encyclopædic of talkers might fail to produce. I do not know how better to express this phenomenon than by describing it as due to the spontaneous action of pure intellect. Without conscious effort, without the semblance of a desire for display, his mind appeared to act upon the matter in hand like a solvent upon a substance. The effect of this was often as the revelation of an unknown force. A few words casually spoken became, as it were, a fiat lux, an act of creation. Let those who knew him at his best endeavour to account to themselves for the sense of power with which his conversation affected them, and they will, I think, be compelled to admit, that though his talk was often witty, always scholarly, and not seldom wise, yet what they marvelled at in him was neither the wit, nor the wisdom, nor the scholarship, but the exhibition of sheer native mind.

And herein, I think, to those who really knew him, will be found the all-sufficient explanation of that nameless excellence which all agree to discover in his writings, and which constitutes the key-stone of his reputation. About his most trifling, as about his most serious

work, there is an inimitable and indescribable quality, which is neither gracefulness only, nor is it merely finish, or polish, or refinement, while at the same time it is each and all of these, and still defies analysis, as securely as the scent and hue of a flower.

But whatever theory be accepted as true respecting the intellectual side of Calverley's character, this view of him alone will not suffi ciently account for his personal ascendency, nor for the unique place which he occupied in the estimation and in the affections of his friends. For he was fully as much and as deservedly loved as he was admired; and if he owed the one distinction to his natural gifts of reason unalloyed, he was indebted for the other, in no less degree, to that singleness and sincerity which were his most conspicuous characteristics upon the ethical side. That he was absolutely free from all taint of littleness or double-mindedness, was manifest, it may be assumed, to the most careless observer; that he was a sincere lover of and seeker after truth for its own sake, was discernible by whosoever had eyes to see behind the very ill-fitting mask of seeming recklessness and indifference with which it sometimes pleased him to disguise himself for the mystification of the overwise. There was yet more in him than this, and to the few who penetrated into the inmost recesses of his nature, there was revealed a depth of tenderness, humility, and trust, the existence of which, even those who had a right to think they knew him well, might be pardoned if they never had suspected. Endowed, however, as he was, with infinite capacities of faith, in the matter of beliefs he was an incarnation of the principle of private judgment; and to mere dogmatic teaching, always and for ever impervious. "Unsanctified intellect," was, I believe, the term applied to him by a certain school at the University; unsophisticated intellect, would, I think, more fitly have expressed the fact, if it wanted to be expressed by an epithet.

An extraordinary carefulness and consideration for others was always a conspicuous characteristic in Calverley; and he endeared himself, particularly amongst his poorer friends and neighbours by a hundred acts of unaffected kindness. In the Somersetshire village in which, previous to his marriage, his home life was chiefly spent, many stories are current illustrating his active and sympathetic good-nature; and when the news of his untimely death passed like an electric shock through the circle of his acquaintance, nowhere was there awakened a feeling of sorrow more deep and true than amongst the cottages of his old home.

Let it not be for a moment supposed that by these imperfect touches I am picturing to myself, or attempting to convey to the reader, the outlines of a faultless character. Calverley had important defects, of which no one was more sensible than himself; and amongst these

was an infirmity of will. It is true that he was never subjected to the bracing stimulus of poverty, and that he was without those promptings of personal ambition which might have supplied its place; still some natural deficiency must be recognised here, and it must be confessed that had he been endowed with a strength of purpose at all commensurate with his intellectual gifts, he would certainly have achieved work more truly worthy of his genius. In his undergraduate days, though capable of the intensest application, he was somewhat prone to self-indulgence, and was at that time, though in after life he entirely overcame the habit, a grievous sinner in the matter of lying late in bed. During the months when he was (or ought to have been) reading for his degree, it became the daily task of one or two faithful friends to effect his dislodgment from his couch before the precious morning hours should be wholly lost. Upon these occasions his chamber became the scene of a conflict which reduced it to a condition resembling that of a ship's cabin at sea in a hurricane. He, with his sturdy frame and resolute countenance, clinging, like "Barbary's nimble

son".

By the teeth, or tail, or eyelid,

to each successive covering, as one by one they were ruthlessly torn from him, amid volleys of good-humoured objurgation-so the battle raged, until, having conscientiously removed every portable article of bed-clothing, his assailants retired victorious, only to return in half an hour and find him peacefully sleeping between the mattresses.

II.

C. S. C. came of a good old English stock. He was born at Martley, in Worcestershire, on the 22nd December, 1831; his father, then known as the Rev. Henry Blayds, removing afterwards to the Vicarage of South Stoke, near Bath. The family, who had borne the name of Blayds from the beginning of the century, in 1852 resumed their proper name of Calverley, under which they had flourished for many generations in their native county of York— being indeed lineally descended from that Walter Calverley, the story of whose ferocious deeds, and still more ferocious punishment, is preserved in the pages of A Yorkshire Tragedy, one of the many spurious plays attributed in an uncritical age to Shakespeare, and included in some of the earliest editions of his works. It was as Blayds that Charles Stuart won his reputation at Harrow and Oxford; at Cambridge he was known as Calverley.

He entered Harrow in the summer of 1846, and from that time forward never ceased to be an object of interest and attention to a widening circle of friends and acquaintances. He is described as a

curly-haired, bright-eyed boy, with a sunny smile and a frank, open countenance; a general favourite for his manliness and inexhaustible good-nature, though already, it is said, distinguished for a certain self-sufficing independence of character which remained with him through life, keeping him always somewhat apart from his fellows, and inducing him, even at this early age, to stand aloof from the little cliques and coteries into which the world of school divides itself as readily and naturally as the world at large.

I could wish that I had it in my power to dwell more at length upon this most interesting period in the life of one upon whom public attention has been fixed in so marked a manner; and I still indulge the hope of being able hereafter to enlarge, from contemporary evidence, upon the story of Calverley's school days. He exhibited in an unique degree just that mixture of insouciance, reckless daring, and brilliancy, which never fails to win the unbounded applause and admiration of every genuine schoolboy. The place is still pointed out where he once leaped down the entire flight of what are known as the school steps, being a clear spring of seventeen feet with a drop of nearly nine, on to hard gravel; and having been unsuccessful in this attempt to break his leg or his neck, he on another occasion sprang over the wall separating the school yard from the "milling ground," an ugly enough fall of some nine or ten feet, accomplishing this latter exploit with his hands in his pockets, and alighting (so the story goes) squarely on to the top of his head; a result with which he was so little satisfied that he at once returned and repeated the jump, reaching ground this time, normally, upon his feet.

These and other similar anecdotes, illustrative of his physical daring, have already been given to the public in various forms; the following, which bears witness to his extraordinary readiness and aptitude in classical composition, is, I think, new, and rests upon unimpeachable authority. He was out walking with a lad who had upon his mind, as a school exercise, a certain passage from The Prophecy of Capys, to be done into longs and shorts, and who propounded to his companion the following couplet, asking him how he would do it into Latin :

Raging beast and raging flood,

Alike have spared their prey.

Calverley appeared to take no notice, and continued for several minutes talking upon indifferent subjects; when all at once he stopped, and said, "How would this do?"—

Sospes uterque manet, talem quia lædere prædam

Nec furor æquoreus nec valet ira feræ.

It may be admitted that many a ripe and practised scholar has

spent hours in turning out less satisfactory work than this, the impromptu of a sixth-form boy. Calverley's career at Oxford, though a failure for academic purposes, was distinguished by a series of tours de force, intellectual and physical, sufficient to have furnished forth a dozen ordinary reputations. He won the Balliol scholarship by a marvellous copy of Latin verses, written off with such rapidity as to be almost an improvisation. His exploits in the way of daring and impossible jumps were long talked of and pointed out, and their memory may perhaps still linger amongst the traditions of the place. Having, in common with the other students, to prepare a Latin theme, to be submitted on a given day at a rivû voce lecture, Calverley appeared in the lecture-room provided like the rest with a neat manuscript book, the pages of which were, however, entirely blank. He had trusted to luck, and hoped that he might escape being "put on." Luck failed him, and in due course the examiner called upon "Mr. Blayds." "Mr. Blayds." Whereupon he stood up and, to the amazement of those who knew the real state of the case, proceeded without the least hesitation, and in calm, fluent tones, to read from his book the exercise which he had not written, and of which not a word had up to that moment been composed. During his second year of residence his connection with Balliol and with Oxford was brought to an abrupt termination. His biographer, while chronicling this fact, must at the same time not fail to insist that the offences against discipline for which he justly suffered were due to exuberance of animal spirits rather than to any graver form of delinquency. Into most of his escapades, however, there entered an element of humour, which, while it does not redeem them from censure, invests them with an interest in relation to his special cast of mind. Of the numerous stories current respecting his Oxford days, some of which went the round of the newspapers at the time of his death, it will be sufficient to notice one or two, the authenticity of which can be vouched for.

The following incident is related rather on account of the punning verses to which it gave rise, than for its own intrinsic interest. The election to scholarships at Balliol took place upon St. Catharine's day (November 25), and on the evening of the same day the newlyelected scholars received formal admission, in the college chapel, at the hands of the Master and fellows. When Calverley's turn came to be presented to the Master, for the purpose of taking the customary oath upon admission to the privileges of a scholar, the fact that he had quite recently been indulging in a pipe forced itself upon the attention of Dr. Jenkyns, who had the strongest dislike to tobacco. On withdrawing from the chapel, the Master turned to the fellows who accompanied him, and said, "Why, the young man is redolent of the weed, even now! It was no doubt this remark of the famous