was actually a plethora of money.  The world, so long irreconcilable, had acknowledged his merits, and the whole man softened.  The angelical character of the forehead gradually spread downwards, and in time tempered even the ferocity of the terrible jaw.  It was the same man, but on better terms with himself and everybody else.  We see him sitting or strolling in his garden with quite a jaunty air—­and when there is a cigar in his mouth, the shadow of which modifies still more the characteristics of that truculent region, it is hard to believe that we are looking at the same man.  He has a youthful vigour, an autumnal green.  In one photograph Lady Burton, devoted as ever to her husband, is seen nestling at his side and leaning her head against his shoulder.  She had grown uncomfortably stout and her tight-fitting dress was hard put to it to bear the strain.  Her glorious hair was now grown gray and thin, and it was generally hidden by a not very becoming big yellowish wig with curls, which made her look like a magnified Marie Antoinette.

Burton’s chief pleasure in his garden was feeding the birds.  They used to wait for him in flocks on an almond tree, and became “quite imperious in their manners if he did not attend to them properly.”  He loved the sparrow especially, for Catullus’ sake.

His gigantic personality impressed all who met him.  Conversation with him reduced the world from a sphere to a spherule.  It shrank steadily—­he had traversed so much of it, and he talked about out-of-the-way places so familiarly.  As of old, when friends stayed with him he never wanted to go to bed, and they, too, listening to his learned, animated and piquant talk, were quite content to outwatch the Bear.  As an anthropologist his knowledge was truly amazing.  “He was also a first-rate surgeon and had read all the regular books."[FN#505] People called him, for the vastness of his knowledge, the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  He looked to the past and the future.  To the past, for no one was more keenly interested in archaeology.  He delighted to wander on forlorn moors among what Shelley calls “dismal cirques of Druid stones.”  To the future, for he continued to study spiritualism, and to gaze into crystals.  He longed to make himself master of the “darkling secrets of Eternity."[FN#506] Both he and Lady Burton were, to use Milton’s expression, “struck with superstition as with a planet.”  She says:  “From Arab or gipsy he got. ... his mysticism, his superstition (I am superstitious enough, God knows, but he was far more so), his divination."[FN#507] Some of it, however, was derived from his friendship in early days with the painter-astrologer Varley.  If a horse stopped for no ascertained reason or if a house martin fell they wondered what it portended.  They disliked the bodeful chirp of the bat, the screech of the owl.  Even the old superstition that the first object seen in the morning—­a crow, a cripple, &c.—­determines the fortunes of the day, had his respect.  “At an hour,” he comments, “when the senses are most impressionable the aspect of unpleasant spectacles has a double effect."[FN#508] He was disturbed by the “drivel of dreams,” and if he did not himself search for the philosopher’s stone he knew many men who were so engaged (he tells us there were a hundred in London alone) and he evidently sympathised with them.