130 Talks with Burton [1906 



than half believed in him as being what he pretended, his wife's connec- 

 tion with the Catholic world probably disposing him to take an interest 

 in the result. I too had something of a similar interest. I had been 

 at school, not indeed with the real Roger Tichborne, but with his 

 younger brother, Alfred, who had been a boy of about my own stand- 

 ing and whom I knew well. When, therefore, I was told I was to meet 

 ' The Claimant ' at the dinner I brushed up my recollection of Alfred so 

 that I might be prepared to see or not to see a likeness between them. 

 Alfred at the age of sixteen had been a rather nice looking boy with 

 a round, good-humoured face, across which, a very notable feature, 

 his thick eyebrows met. Without being stupid he was a quite unin- 

 tellectual boy, and had passed by seniority into the highest class of 

 the school without, I think I may safely say, having learned a dozen 

 words of Latin or Greek. It was about all he could do to write in 

 ungrammatical sentences an English letter, and his time was spent in 

 entire idleness and smoking so incurable that he had been allowed at 

 last to indulge it as an alternative to his expulsion. I was conse- 

 quently not prepared for special intelligence in his pretended brother, 

 but I looked out for the eyebrows and there, without question, they 

 were across Sir Roger's face. I treated him, therefore, as Burton 

 did, in the light of a young man of decent birth gone woefully to 

 seed. His huge frame and coarse manner seemed to conceal reminis- 

 cences of aristocratic breeding as authentic perhaps, it was not saying 

 much, as Alfred's. 



" With these two men I therefore spent much of my time during the 

 next few weeks but naturally more with Burton. (I unfortunately 

 kept no notes nor journals then.) My talks with Burton were of a 

 most intimate kind, religion, philosophy, travel, politics. I had hardly 

 as yet visited the East, but Eastern travel had interested me from the 

 day I had read Palgrave's ' Journeys in Arabia,' and Burton was fond 

 of reciting his Arabian adventures. In his talk he affected an extreme 

 brutality, and if one could have believed the whole of what he said, 

 he had indulged in every vice and committed every crime. I soon 

 found, however, that most of these recitals were indulged in pour 

 epdtcr le bourgeois and that his inhumanity was more pretended than 

 real. Even the ferocity of his countenance gave place at times to more 

 agreeable expressions, and I can just understand the infatuated fancy 

 of his wife that in spite of his ugliness he was the most beautiful 

 man alive. He had, however, a power of assuming the abominable 

 which cannot be exaggerated. I remember once his insisting that I 

 should allow him to try his mesmeric power on me, and his expression 

 as he gazed into my eyes was nothing less than atrocious. If I had 

 submitted to his gaze for any length of time — and he held me by my 

 thumbs — I have no doubt he would have succeeded in dominating me. 



