There was a great deal he still wanted to do.  He had intended to revise The Way of All Flesh, to write a book about Tabachetti, and to publish a new edition of Ex Voto with the mistakes corrected.  Also he wished to reconsider the articles reprinted in this volume and was looking forward to painting more sketches and composing more music.  While lying ill and very feeble within a few days of the end, and not knowing whether it was to be the end or not, he said to me: 

“I am much better to-day.  I don’t feel at all as though I were going to die.  Of course, it will be all wrong if I do get well, for there is my literary position to be considered.  First I write Erewhon—­that is my opening subject; then, after modulating freely through all my other books and the music and so on, I return gracefully to my original key and write Erewhon Revisited.  Obviously, now is the proper moment to come to a full close, make my bow and retire; but I believe I am getting well after all.  It’s very inartistic, but I cannot help it.”

Some of his readers complain that they often do not know whether he is serious or jesting.  He wrote of Lord Beaconsfield:  “Earnestness was his greatest danger, but if he did not quite overcome it (as indeed who can? it is the last enemy that shall be subdued), he managed to veil it with a fair amount of success.”  To veil his own earnestness he turned most naturally to humour, employing it in a spirit of reverence, as all the great humorists have done, to express his deepest and most serious convictions.  He was aware that he ran the risk of being misunderstood by some, but he also knew that it is useless to try to please all, and, like Mozart, he wrote to please himself and a few intimate friends.

I cannot speak at length of his kindness, consideration, and sympathy; nor of his generosity, the extent of which was very great and can never be known—­it was sometimes exercised in unexpected ways, as when he gave my laundress a shilling because it was “such a beastly foggy morning”; nor of his slightly archaic courtliness—­ unless among people he knew well he usually left the room backwards, bowing to the company; nor of his punctiliousness, industry, and painstaking attention to detail—­he kept accurate accounts not only of all his property by double entry but also of his daily expenditure, which he balanced to a halfpenny every evening, and his handwriting, always beautiful and legible, was more so at sixty-six than at twenty-six; nor of his patience and cheerfulness during years of anxiety when he had few to sympathize with him; nor of the strange mixture of simplicity and shrewdness that caused one who knew him well to say:  “II sait tout; il ne sait rien; il est poete.”