TABLE-TALK 



455 



stranger, and choosing a subject which put me at ray 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 :— 



