for quotation in their columns.  The Patchwork stories thus got into circulation one by one.  Kind friends of Mr. Locker’s, who had been told, or had discovered for themselves, that he was somewhat of a wag, would frequently regale him with bits of his own Patchwork, introducing them to his notice as something they had just heard, which they thought he would like—­murdering his own stories to give him pleasure.  His countenance on such occasions was a rendezvous of contending emotions, a battlefield of rival forces.  Politeness ever prevailed, but it took all his irony and sad philosophy to hide his pain. Patchwork is such a good collection of the kind of story he liked best that it was really difficult to avoid telling him a story that was not in it.  I made the blunder once myself with a Voltairean anecdote.  Here it is as told in Patchwork:  ’Voltaire was one day listening to a dramatic author reading his comedy, and who said, “Ici le chevalier rit!” He exclaimed:  “Le chevalier est bien heureux!"’ I hope I told it fairly well.  He smiled sadly, and said nothing, not even Et tu, Brute!

In 1886 Mr. Locker printed for presentation a catalogue of his printed books, manuscripts, autograph letters, drawings, and pictures.  Nothing of his own figures in this catalogue, and yet in a very real sense the whole is his.  Most of the books are dispersed, but the catalogue remains, not merely as a record of rareties and bibliographical details dear to the collector’s heart, but as a token of taste.  Just as there is, so Wordsworth reminds us, ‘a spirit in the woods,’ so is there still, brooding over and haunting the pages of the ’Rowfant Catalogue,’ the spirit of true connoisseurship.  In the slender lists of Locker’s ‘Works’ this book must always have a place.

Frederick Locker died at Rowfant on May 30, 1895, leaving behind him, carefully prepared for the press, a volume he had christened My Confidences:  An Autographical Sketch addressed to My Descendants.

In due course the book appeared, and was misunderstood at first by many.  It cut a strange, outlandish figure among the crowd of casual reminiscences it externally resembled.  Glancing over the pages of My Confidences, the careless library subscriber encountered the usual number of names of well-known personages, whose appearance is supposed by publishers to add sufficient zest to reminiscences to secure for them a sale large enough, at any rate, to recoup the cost of publication.  Yet, despite these names, Mr. Locker’s book is completely unlike the modern memoir.  Beneath a carefully-constructed, and perhaps slightly artificially maintained, frivolity of tone, the book is written in deadly earnest.  Not for nothing did its author choose as one of the mottoes for its title-page, ’Ce ne sont mes gestes que j’ecrie; c’est moy.’  It may be said of this book, as of Senancour’s Oberman: