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stranger, and choosing a subject which put me at my ease 

 at once, while he told me all manner of new and interesting 

 things." 



A few more fragments of his conversation have been 

 preserved the following by Mr. Wilfrid Ward. Speaking 

 of Tennyson's conversation, he said : 



Doric beauty is its characteristic perfect simplicity, with- 

 out any ornament or anything artificial. 



Telling how he had been to a meeting of the British 

 Museum Trustees, he said : 



After the meeting, Archbishop Benson helped me on with 

 my great-coat. I was quite overcome by this species of spiritual 

 investiture. Thank you, Archbishop," I said, " I feel as if I 

 were receiving the pallium" 



Speaking of two men of letters, with neither of whom he 

 sympathised, he once said : 



Don't mistake me. One is a thinker and man of letters, the 

 other is only a literary man. Erasmus was a man of letters, 

 Gigadibs a literary man. A.B. is the incarnation of Gigadibs. 

 I should call him Gigadibsius Optimus Maximus. 



Another time, referring to Dean Stanley's historical 

 impressionability, as militating against his sympathies with 

 Colenso, he said : 



Stanley could believe in anything of which he had seen the 

 supposed site, but was sceptical where he had not seen. At a 

 breakfast at Monckton Milnes's, just at the time of the Colenso 

 row, Milnes asked me my views on the Pentateuch, and I gave 

 them. Stanley differed from me. The account of Creation in 

 Genesis he dismissed at once as unhistorical ; but the call of 

 Abraham, and the historical narrative of the Pentateuch, he 

 accepted. This was because he had seen Palestine but he 

 wasn't present at the Creation. 



When he and Stanley met, there was sure to be a brisk 

 interchange of repartee. One of these occasions, a ballot 

 night at the Athenaeum, has been recorded by the late Sir 

 W. H. Flower : 



