Fear of man was a feeling unknown to him, and he despised it in others.  “Of ten men,” he used to say, quoting an Osmanli proverb, “nine are women.”  Behind his bed hung a map of Africa, and over that a motto in Arabic which meant: 

   “All things pass.”

This saying he used to observe, was always a consolation to him.

If he had been eager for money, it was only for what money would buy.  He wanted it because it would enable him to do greater work.  “I was often stopped, in my expeditions,” he told Dr. Baker, “for the want of a hundred pounds.”  He was always writing:  in the house, in the desert, in a storm, up a tree, at dinner, in bed, ill or well, fresh or tired,—­indeed, he used to say that he never was tired.  There was nothing histrionic about him, and he never posed, except “before fools and savages.”  He was frank, straightforward, and outspoken, and his face was an index of his mind.  Every thought was visible just “as through a crystal case the figured hours are seen.”  He was always Burton, never by any chance any one else.  As.  Mr. A. C. Swinburne said of him:  “He rode life’s lists as a god might ride.”  Of English Literature and especially of poetry he was an omnivorous reader.  He expressed warm admiration for Chaucer, “jolly old Walter Mapes,” Butler’s Hudibras, and Byron, especially Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, with its allusions to his beloved Tasso, Ariosto and Boccaccio.  Surely, however, he ought not to have tried to set us against that tender line of Byron’s,

   “They keep his dust in Arqua, where he died,"[FN#509]

by pointing out that the accent of Arqua is rightly on the second syllable, and by remarking:  “Why will not poets mind their quantities in lieu of stultifying their lines by childish ignorance."[FN#510] Then, too, he savagely attacked Tennyson for his “rasher of bacon line”—­“the good Haroun Alraschid,"[FN#511] Raschid being properly accented on the last syllable.  Of traveller authors, he preferred “the accurate Burckhardt.”  He read with delight Boswell’s Johnson, Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands, Renan’s Life of Jesus, Gibbon, whom he calls “our great historian"[FN#512] and the poems of Coleridge.  At Cowper he never lost an opportunity of girding, both on account of his Slave Ballads[FN#513] and the line: 

   “God made the country and man made the town."[FN#514]

“Cowper,” he comments, “had evidently never seen a region untouched by the human hand.”  It goes without saying that he loved “his great namesake,” as he calls him, “Robert Burton, of melancholy and merry, of facete and juvenile memory.”  Of contemporary work he enjoyed most the poems of D. G. Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. John Payne and FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat, and we find him praising Mr. Edmund Gosse’s lyrics.  Of novelists Dickens was his favourite.  He called Darwin “our British Aristotle.”  Eothen[FN#515] was “that book of books.”  He never