No man expatiated less.  He never expounded anything in his born days; he very soon wearied of those he called ‘strong’ talkers.  His critical method was in a conversational manner to direct your attention to something in a poem or a picture, to make a brief suggestion or two, perhaps to apply an epithet, and it was all over, but your eyes were opened.  Rapture he never professed, his tones were never loud enough to express enthusiasm, but his enjoyment of what he considered good, wherever he found it—­and he was regardless of the set judgments of the critics—­was most intense and intimate.  His feeling for anything he liked was fibrous:  he clung to it.  For all his rare books and prints, if he liked a thing he was very tolerant of its format.  He would cut a drawing out of a newspaper, frame it, hang it up, and be just as tender towards it as if it were an impression with the unique remarque.

Mr. Locker had probably inherited his virtuoso’s whim from his ancestors.  His great-grandfather was certified by Johnson in his life of Addison to be a gentleman ‘eminent for curiosity and literature,’ and though his grandfather, the Commodore, who lives for ever in our history as the man who taught Nelson the lesson that saved an Empire—­’Lay a Frenchman close, and you will beat him’—­was no collector, his father, Edward Hawke Locker, though also a naval man, was not only the friend of Sir Walter Scott, but a most judicious buyer of pictures, prints, and old furniture.

Frederick Locker was born in 1821, in Greenwich Hospital, where Edward Hawke Locker was Civil Commissioner.  His mother was the daughter of one of the greatest book-buyers of his time, a man whose library it took nine days to disperse—­the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, the friend and opponent of George Washington, an ecclesiastic who might have been first Bishop of Edinburgh, but who died a better thing, the Vicar of Epsom.

Frederick Locker grew up among pretty things in the famous hospital.  Water-colours by Lawrence, Prout, Girtin, Turner, Chinnery, Paul Sandby, Cipriani, and other masters; casts after Canova; mezzotints after Sir Joshua; Hogarth’s famous picture of David Garrick and his wife, now well hung in Windsor Castle, were about him, and early attracted his observant eye.  Yet the same things were about his elder brother Arthur, an exceedingly clever fellow, who remained quite curiously impervious to the impressiveness of pretty things all his days.

Locker began collecting on his own account after his marriage, in 1850, to a daughter of Lord Byron’s enemy, the Lord Elgin, who brought the marbles from Athens to Bloomsbury.  His first object, at least so he thought, was to make his rooms pretty.  From the beginning of his life as a connoisseur he spared himself no pains, often trudging miles, when not wanted at the Admiralty Office, in search of his prey.  If any mercantile-minded friend ever inquired what anything had cost, he would be answered with