xxvi WAYFARING NOTIONS 



himself, but even with his life in danger there 

 never was a gap. The last columns he had 

 strength to evolve appeared on 8th April 1906. 

 ''There won't be any Notions this week — the 

 first time for twenty years," he said to me a few 

 days later. I could only try to say cheerfully 

 how the gap would be noticed. 



Naturally, he had little or no time for reading 



except in hours taken from sleep, but he always 



enjoyed a sterling book, and his taste in literature 



was as instinctively good as it was catholic. 



Dickens he knew and appreciated from end to end. 



He once characterised that author most shrewdly 



as "a shorthand reporter of genius." He knew 



Shakespeare and Sheridan, Lindsay Gordon and 



William Cobbett, Marryat and Besant & Rice. 



In Miss Jekyll's ''Old West Surrey" he was 



much interested, and he thoroughly enjoyed the 



Irish horse-and-hound tales of the Somerville- 



Ross partnership and of Dorothea Conyers. 



The last new book he ever read and liked was 



Agnes and Egerton Castle's " Rose of the 



World." Indeed, though the most ungrumble- 



some and readiest to be pleased of men, he had 



a remarkably fine natural taste in all directions. 



His life was too busy for "culture," but it was a 



family joke that whether in antique furniture or 



new books, live horseflesh or defunct Southdown 



mutton, " Cobbetts always knows the best." 



