Into all that he wrote—­and I shall deal later with that point in detail—­his true and candid spirit was infused.  Just as in his life, in his daily actions, you were continually surprised by his tenderness turning round the corner of his austere reserve, so in his work his sentiment came with a curious appeal, with tender surprises, with an emotion that was all the keener on account of the contrast that it made with the courage, the hope, and the fine manliness of all his thought and all his word.  Children, helplessness of all kinds, touched always that merciful heart.  I can scarcely think of him as a man of the world, although he had had in his few and glorious days experience enough to harden the spirit of any man.  He could never, as I think of him, have grown into your swaggering, money-making, bargaining man of Universal Trade.  Keen and significant his policy, his ordering of his affairs must ever have been; but the keenness and significance were the outcome, not of any cool eye to the main chance, but of a gay sense of the pure need of logic, not only in letters but also in living.

There, again, I touch another characteristic—­his feeling for logic, for dialectic, which made him one of the severest reasoners that it would be possible to meet in argument.  He used, in his admirably assumed air of brag, an attitude which he could take with perfect humour and perfect dignity—­to protest that he was one of two or three Englishmen who had ever mastered the philosophical systems of Germany, from Kant to Hegel, from Hegel to Schopenhauer.  Though he said it with an airy sense of fun, and almost of disparagement, I am strongly inclined to believe that it was true.  He was never satisfied with his knowledge:  invariably curious, he was guided by his joy in pure reasoning to the philosophies of the world, and in his silent, quiet, unobtrusive way he became a master of many subjects which life was too brief in his case to permit him to show to his friends, much less to the world.

This, it will be readily understood, is, as I have said, the merest summary of a character, as one person has understood it.  Others will reach him from other points of view.  Meanwhile Ladysmith has him—­what is that phrase of his?—­“You squirm between iron fingers.”  Fortunate he, so far that he is at rest, squirming no longer; and with the wail on his lips, the catch in the throat, he went down in the embrace of a deadlier enemy than the Bulwan horror, to which he made reference in one of the last lines he was destined to write in this world.  He fell ill in that pestilent town, as all the world knows.  His constitution was strong enough; he had not lived a life of unpropitious preparation for a serious illness; but his heart was a danger.  Typhoid is fatal to any heart-weakness, particularly in convalescence; and he was caught suddenly as he was growing towards perfect health.