little else; and in whom you would be surprised to find a subtle critic of the delicacies of literature and art; a genial philosopher, interested in the most diverse manifestations of humanity; and a story-teller who could light up the very dullest narrative with flashes of the driest, brightest humour. These things constituted his charm, which was appreciable by all who knew him. The secret of his value in Pelican's eyes was what might be called the fluidity of his mind: its power of penetrating into other minds, and for the moment becoming one with them, and seeing through their eyes. He was very fond of that great maxim of Joubert's: "One should be fearful of being wrong in poetry when one thinks differently from the poets, and in religion when one thinks differently from the saints ;" and he never fell into the mistake of making judgments in one region of thought upon data derived from another. He was not a man who would be called "religious," but he paid the very highest tribute in his power to what is ordinarily known as "religious experience," by assigning to it a real scientific value, and maintaining that in the world of pure religion, the evidence of the spiritual man was equal in value to the evidence of the practical experimentalist in the world of science. "Spirit and matter," he said once, are both real; but you have to assume both at the beginning, for the man who only assumes one never gets beyond it to the other. I see no prospect of a reconciliation between the men of piety and the men of science,

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and yet both are right, though only half-right. I suppose both are needed, for the secret of power is concentration: you must see only one thing. The typical man of business, for example, cannot trouble himself about moral beauty; his eye is fixed on cash-on success. He inquires concerning this or that transaction, not, 'Is it right?' but, 'Can it be done?' and he does it; concerning this man, 'Can he be done?' and he does him!"

Dr. Wade was a much less complex character than Mr. Brownlow. He was a poet, and had all the guilelessness and simplicity popularly supposed to belong to the poetic character, but so seldom really found there. I have not known many poets myself, for I never had any` money to lend; but I do not generally find that the knack of stringing together a few pretty verses is at all indicative either of a want of ability to count the number of shillings in a pound, or of any willingness to receive nineteen instead of twenty. Dr. Wade was, however, a complete realization of the popular poetic ideal. His life was, on the whole, a happy one; but his commercial friends considered it one long failure. One of them pathetically remarked that it cut him to the heart to see a man with every kind of sense but common sense. Pelican, who, on the contrary, hated common sense, which he called the materialism of the mob, loved Dr. Wade mainly because he had not a particle of it in his whole composition. Patients might come, and patients might go; but the doctor, far away in the land of dreams,

where he loved to wander, sat in his dingy little consulting room, writing verses about the spiritual meaning of nature, or delivering with slow eloquence to Pelican, or some equally congenial listener, a Coleridgean monologue, composed of about equal parts of Swedenborg, Wordsworth, and George Fox, with a strong flavour of Dr. Wade himself permeating the whole. He was a natural nomad. He seemed to fly from success as eagerly as other men pursue it; and as soon as he had made a good practice at Brookfield, his wandering mania seized him, and he left it and us behind him.

Hume said of Berkeley's philosophy that it admitted of no refutation, and produced no conviction. Pelican had one friend for whom this celebrated dictum was not true. Berkeleyianism was to him not merely the only reasonable, but the only conceivable, theory of the universe. Ideas were to him the only existences; the visions of other people were his realities. Arthur Warriner was one of those transcendentalists who, as Emerson says, when they look at events see them as spirits.

"The outward shows of sky and earth

And hill and valley he had viewed;"

and they were to him but shows,-appearances dimly reflecting a living thought behind. To this young manfor he was but young in years though old in ripeness of thought and perfection of culture-Pelican clùng with a grip even tighter than that of mere affection. The fact

was, I think (though on a matter like this one cannot speak with the certainty of personal knowledge), that in Arthur Warriner's society he felt he could escape from himself, or rather from a part of himself, that dragged him whither he would not go. He sometimes confessed that he had the mind of a materialistic sceptic; and it was only the presence of the mysterious something which we call the Self, the Ego, that kept the mind in check and prevented it from asserting a despotic authority over the man. Sometimes, however, the mind would, in spite of the self, make an effort to gain pre-eminence, or, as he expressed it, the Aristotle in him would rise against the Plato; and then he flew to his friend whose clear vision of the spiritual behind the phenomenal became his by sympathetic insight.

It was Arthur Warriner who introduced him to the works of a man who was then known only to a select few, but who is fast becoming recognised as the richest and truest of our modern English poets. Pelican's love for the mere music of verse at first hindered him from feeling towards Robert Browning all that Warriner felt; but he soon found out that there was real song, not less than teaching, in the man who had, for a time, seemed a mere embodiment of rugged force. Music? Yes; the true music of great poetic passion, as Pelican came to see in later days when dear Arthur Warriner had left us for ever, and I sat listening to him as he read the marvellous poem in which the dying wife speaks

to her husband of the consolations in poorer loves which she sadly foresees he will seek when she has departed. How well I remember the exultant energy with which he declaimed that nobly passionate verse which comes nearly at the close of the poem :

"Re-coin thyself and give it them to spend,

It all comes to the same thing at the end,

Since mine thou wast, mine art, and mine shalt be: Faithful or faithless, sealing up the sum,

Or lavish of the treasure, thou must come

Back to the heart's place here I keep for thee."

"There!" he would exclaim, half defiantly, as if he expected me to assume the position of a hostile critic;

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"if Browning had never written anything but this one poem; if he had never written anything but this one verse; if he had written only the last half of it, he would have still shown himself a great poet, in virtue of being able to express adequately the one thing which so many have tried to express and failed so miserably -the divine persistence of a supreme love."

I could write much more of these three friends and of others who one by one appeared above his horizon, and became more or less dear to him; but were I to go on as I might, this chapter would grow out of all proportion. Of his foes there is very little to be said. There were many who, for various reasons, disliked him, and whom, because of their dislike he shunned; but he was not good hater. He was, like Mr. Boy