JET. 21.] TEMPERAMENT AND CHARACTER. 39 



City compelled frequent absence from London for 

 several weeks, and sometimes months at a time, as in 

 the case of Epernay, where he remained one winter. 

 The other members of the Society were likewise 

 summoned away one by one to their professional or 

 business avocations, and the Zetetical Society, after 

 its brief term of useful and improving work, was 

 broken up. 



Its members formed an interesting group. All were 

 steady, earnest young men entering upon life all 

 animated by the same spirit all eager for self- 

 improvement. Not one, alas ! survives to tell the 

 tale, but old letters which come to light reveal that 

 their affection for their young leader was life-long, and 

 did not cease with the breaking up of the Society. 



There is no doubt but that Joseph Prestwich was a 

 remarkable man, endowed with remarkable gifts. But 

 for that extreme diffidence, that constitutional shyness 

 which he had inherited from his mother, and which 

 prevented him from ever possessing the confidence in 

 his own powers necessary for every public man, he 

 might have come much more prominently to the front. 

 Although always and everywhere very popular, that 

 distrust in himself interfered with his career as a 

 public man and a speaker. This lack of self-assertion, 

 however, did not lessen the number of his personal 

 friends, for no one ever possessed a greater gift of 

 attracting and winning the regard, and retaining the 

 attachment, of those he valued and who knew him 

 intimately. They found in him a kindliness, or rather 

 a brotherliness, peculiar to himself. To comparative 

 strangers he appeared reserved. As Prestwich's old 

 friend Mr S. R Pattison justly remarked, "He was 

 free from assumption of any kind, and always began 



