you write my Life and Letters . . ."; but his modesty and his humour would have been perturbed in equal measure by the vision of a solemn biography and a low-voiced press. "I was a little bit underpraised before," he once confessed; "I'm being a little bit overpraised now." Since the best of himself went impartially into all that he wrote, his conscience could never be haunted by the recollection of shoddy workmanship, even in the days before he had a reputation to jeopardize; nor, when he had won recognition, could his head be turned by the announcement that he had created a masterpiece. If he enjoyed the consciousness of having filled the English treasury with the literary spoils of six countries, he dissembled his enjoyment. In so far as he wished to be remembered at all, it was not as a man of letters, but as a friend, a connoisseur of life, a man of sympathy un-*aging and zest unstaled, a lover of simple jests, a laughing philosopher. Of their charity, he wished those who loved him to have masses said for the repose of his soul; he would have been tortured by the thought that, in life or death, he had brought unhappiness
