1906] Sir Richard Burton's Character 131 



But my will also is strong, and when I had met his eyes of a wild 

 beast for a couple of minutes I broke away and would have no more. 



" On matters of religion and philosophy he was fond, too, of dis- 

 coursing. There I could argue with him and hold my own, for he was 

 not really profound; and always at the bottom of his materialistic pro- 

 fessions I found a groundwork of belief in the supernatural which 

 refused to face thought's ultimate conclusions. I came at last to look 

 upon him as less dangerous than he seemed, and even to be in certain 

 aspects of his mind, a ' sheep in wolf's clothing.' The clothing, how- 

 ever, was a very complete disguise, and as I have said he was not a 

 man to play with, sitting alone with him far into the night, especially 

 in such an atmosphere of violence, as Buenos Aires then could boast, 

 when men were shot almost nightly in the streets. Burton was a grim 

 being to be with at the end of his second bottle with a gaucho's navaja 

 handy to his hand. 



" His visit to the Pampas ended tamely enough in his crossing it 

 with ' The Claimant,' the two inside the ordinary diligence, to Mendoza 

 and thence on mules to the Pacific. As to Aconcagua (he always 

 insisted the mountain should be pronounced with an accent on the last 

 syllable) we heard no more of it, after the appearance of a final para- 

 graph in the Buenos Aires ' Standard ' making fun of it and him. 

 ' The great traveller Burton, it is said, has just completed his final 

 preparations for his exploration of the Pampas and Andes. Among his 

 latest acquisitions with this object are, we understand, a small field- 

 piece to be mounted on the roof of the diligence in which he proposes 

 to travel and a few torpedoes for use in crossing rivers.' 



" The Buenos Aires ' Standard ' of those days was the creation of 

 a cheerful and irresponsible Irishman named Mulhall, to whose office. 

 I used now and then to go for a quarter of an hour's gossip about 

 local matters, when he would ask me to lend a hand with his ' copy ' 

 and turn a ' paragraph.' I am not sure that the paragraph just quoted 

 was not one of mine. Mulhall afterwards rose to eminence in the 

 world as a statistician, to the surprise, I imagine, of everyone who in 

 1868 knew him at Buenos Aires. 



" Such is my personal recollection of Burton when he must have 

 been forty-eight years old as I was twenty-eight. He seemed to me 

 then already a broken man, physically, nor did he impress me very 

 strongly on his intellectual side. For that reason, perhaps. I have 

 never been able to rate him as highly as have done most of his con- 

 temporaries, the friends who knew him. I am aware that I saw him 

 at his worst, but from a literary point of view, too, he seems to me 

 second-rate. His prose style is certainly of a poor order, and his verse 

 as bad. As an oriental linguist he was no doubt great, and in his youth 

 he had great powers of simulating Eastern character in various dis- 



