1890 SOCIAL LIFE 189 



Why thou dost never come, 

 To watch them flying home, 

 Upon the purple breast, 

 Where daylight sinks to rest.' 



The Journal 1887, 1888, and 1889 is full of men- 

 tion of pleasant dinners and meetings with interesting 

 people. Young as Mr. Eomanes was, he attained long 

 before he died 'that which should accompany old age — 

 honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,' and as one 

 turns over the brief records of the Journal one is struck 

 with the brightness of his outward life. He enjoyed con- 

 stant pleasant intercourse with men and women differ- 

 ing widely in pursuits, in opinions, in social position ; 

 he was full of plans for work, work which led him into 

 many different phases of intellectual life, and he had 

 every year an admixture of country life and country 

 pursuits, and the love for music and for poetry, which 

 increased each year, kept him from growing too 

 absorbed in science, from being at all one-sided. He 

 used sometimes to say he had too many interests, but 

 be that as it may, these interests gave him much 

 enjoyment and made him the most delightful of 

 companions. 



A dear friend wrote of him after his death that 

 ' In the home few men have been more surrounded by 

 love, or have better deserved it,' and few men have 

 been more loved by those outside his home. He had an 

 unlimited capacity for loyal, true-hearted friendship. 

 As one most truly said, ' Eomanes was the most loyal 

 of friends.' 



There was something womanly in the tenderness 

 which he felt for anyone in trouble of mind or body, 

 and he was — what perhaps is even more rare — always 

 ready to put aside his own work to help other people. 

 He never grudged time or trouble to write lette: i or 



