Chapter II

As an eminent Dundonian divine, who wishes to remain anonymous, remarks, it is a melancholy fact that men of genius have often been prone to violent ebullitions of temper. He recalls the sad case of MILTON, who, while he was dictating his _Areopagitica_, threw an ink-horn at his daughter, "to the complete denigration of her habiliments," as he himself described it. Yet MILTON was a man of high character and replete with moral uplift. I remember that my old master, Professor Cawker of Aberdeen, once told me that as a child he was liable to fits of freakishness, in one of which he secreted himself under the table during a dinner-party at his father's house and sewed the dresses of the ladies together. The result, when they rose to leave the room, was disastrous in the extreme. But Professor Cawker, as I need hardly remind my readers, was a genial and noble-hearted man. I presented him on his marriage with a set of garnet studs. Ever after when I dined at his house he wore them. Nothing was ever said between us, but we both knew, and I shall never forget.

III.

My old friend, Lemmens Porter, whose name I deeply regret not to have read in the Honours List, reminds me of the painful story of SWINBURNE, who, in a fit of temper, hurled two poached eggs at GEORGE MEREDITH for speaking disrespectfully of VICTOR HUGO. The incident is suppressed in Mr. GOSSE'S tactful life, but Mr. Porter had it direct from MEREDITH, whose bath-chair he frequently pulled at Dorking. SWINBURNE was, I regret to say, pagan in his views, but, unlike some pagans, he was incapable of adhering to the golden mean. ARISTOTLE, I feel certain, would never have condescended to the use of such a missile, and it is beyond "imagination's widest stretch" to picture, say, the late Dr. JOSEPH COOK, of Boston, the present Lord ABERDEEN, or the Rev. Dr. Donald McGuffin acting in such a wild and tempestuous manner.