pertinacious.  ‘When I am as old as you?’ was my ungallant rejoinder.  I had to write the character out a hundred times.  Then one Christmas Day I ventured to ask my father, who said I would find out about him in Gibbon.  But I knew he was not speaking the truth, because he laughed in a nervous, peculiar way, and added that since I was so fond of history I must go to Oxford when I was older.  I loathed history, and inwardly resolved that Cambridge should be my University.  My mother admitted entire ignorance of Potemki’s identity; and on my sketching his character (for I was proud of the knowledge), said he was obviously a ‘horrid’ man.  His personality shadowed my childhood with a deadly fascination, which has not entirely worn away; producing the same sort of effect on me as an imaginary portrait by Pater.

In a semi-geographical work called Near Home; or, Europe Described, published by Hatchards in the fifties (though my friend, Mr. Arthur Humphreys, denies all knowledge of it), I can recall many stereos of dialectic cast in a Socratic mould:—­

   Q.  What is the religion of the Italians? A.  They are Roman
   Catholics.

   Q.  What do the Roman Catholics worship? A.  Idols and a piece of
   bread.

   Q.  Would not God be very angry if He knew the Italians worshipped
   idols and a piece of bread? A.  God IS very angry.

Mr. Augustine Birrell, if still interested in educational phenomena, will not be surprised to learn that when I reached to man’s estate I ’embraced the errors of Rome,’ as my historical manual would have phrased it.

I pity the child who did not learn universal history from Collier.  How tame are the periods of Lord Acton, the Rev. William Hunt, Froude, Freeman, Oman, Round, even Macaulay, and little Arthur, beside the rich Elethian periods of William Francis Collier.  Not Berenson, not Byron, not Beerbohm, have given us such a picture of Venice as Collier in describing the Council of Ten:—­

The ten were terrible; but still more terrible were the three inquisitors—­two black, one red—­appointed in 1454.  Deep mystery hung over the three.  They were elected by the ten; none else knew their names.  Their great work was to kill; and no man—­doge, councillor, or inquisitor—­was beyond their reach.  Secretly they pronounced a doom; and ere long the stiletto or the poison cup had done its work, or the dark waters of the lagoon had closed over a life.  The spy was everywhere.  No man dared to speak out, for his most intimate companions might be on the watch to betray him.  Bronze vases, shaped like a lion’s mouth, gaped at the corner of every square to receive the names of suspected persons.  Gloom and suspicion haunted gondola and hearth!!

It is owing to Collier that I know at least one fact about the Goths who took Rome, ’having reduced the citizens to feed on mice and nettles, A.D. 546,’ a diet to which many of the hotel proprietors in the imperial city still treat their clients.