"Yes", I said, "but the essay on Warren Hastings its just as good", and I began again:
"He looked like a great man, and not like a bad one. A person small and emaciated, yet deriving dignity from a carriage which, while it indicated deference to the Court, indicated also habitual self-possession and self-respect. A high and intellectual forehead; a brow pensive but not gloomy, a mouth of inflexible decision, a face on which was written as legibly as under the great picture in the Council Chamber of Calcutta, Mens aequa in arduis: such was the aspect with which the great proconsul presented himself to his judges."
"Have you learned all this by heart!" cried the Doctor laughing.
"I don't have to learn stuff like that", I replied. "one reading is enough".
He stared at me.
"I was surely right in bringing you down here", he began, "I wanted to get you a berth in the Intermediate; but there's no room: if you could put up with that sofa, I'd have the steward make up a bed for you on it".
"Oh, would you!" I cried, "how kind of you, and you'll let me read your books?" "Everyone of 'em", he replied, adding, "I only wish I could make as good use of them".
The upshot of it was that in an hour he had drawn some of my story from me and we were great friends. His name was Keogh. "Of course he's Irish", I said to myself, as I went to sleep that night: "no one else would have been so kind".
The ordinary man will think I am bragging here about my memory. He's mistaken. Swinburne's memory especially for poetry was far, far better than mine, and I have always regretted the fact that a good
