comfortable. Even the temperature is carefully regulated with a view to the warmth of my body. All honour to the man who founded this place for English students, say I. Out of my heart I speak—I who can have elsewhere, I am thankful to say, a quiet room and a store, though a small one, of books. If I am thus grateful, what must be the advantage of this room to the many—too many—poor Helots of the kingdom of literature, whose toil is carried on in poverty and neglect? What an unspeakable boon this room must be to—to this old man who sits on my left?
So I mused, as I sat in the library of the British Museum. It was in the autumn of the year 1861. I was engaged in work which required frequent reference to some rare old MSS., and which would probably make it necessary for me to undertake a pilgrimage to the Palace of Bloomsbury three or four days in every week for about a month. I was struck, as who is not? with the lavish completeness of the great institution, and I could not but imagine the deeper feeling of luxury and comfort which would strike one who like myself had obtained the privilege of a card of admission, but who, unlike myself, had come forth from squalor and scant food in the morning, and would return to squalor and scant food at night. It was very easy to apply all this to my neighbour.
He was an old man, bent with years. Sparse hairs straggled long and unkempt on his head, and low on his breast there wandered, as on that of Merlin:
The lists of such a beard as youth gone out
Had left in ashes.
His face was pinched, and wan, and transparent, but about the haggard features there still lingered the light of a comely youth, and from the half-buried eyes there still flashed sparks of intellectual fire. His dress was worn and mean to the last degree, but there was a certain refinement showing, like the beauty of Cophetua’s queen, through an old coat whose original colour not all Houndsditch could have discovered. No one meeting that shabby figure—no one, that is, with an atom of discrimination, would ever have seen in it the ruins of a rowdy or the clever get-up of a professional impostor. Before him lay a thick MS. book, of which apparently about three-quarters were filled. He was diligently examining one of a pile of dingy folios, yellow MSS., and many books of reference, which covered his portion of table. Ever and anon he added a sentence to his work, and, without attempting to read the words, I could see that they were written in the minutest of all the “types” of chirography. The thin hands shook with a palsy of excitement whenever the searching eyes had discovered a passage which suggested or required an insertion in the progressing page. The old man was evidently an enthusiast in his work.
Not that I noticed even thus much on my first visit to the Museum; but when day after day I saw the same old man seated in the same place, filling the same MS. with extracts from the same pile of books, I could not but observe this and more. As often as the previous occupation of an earlier visitor did not thwart me, I took the same seat. But whether I was or was not in time for mine, no one ever frustrated the old man. Only to those who have never seen the Museum library need I explain that for the convenience of the attendants, as well as that of the readers, the seats are all lettered and numbered. Whenever I could I appropriated D. 7; but whether I or another occupied D. 7, the old man was invariably to be seen in D. 8. I began to look on him as a part of the building. I should have been as much startled at his absence as by that of the statues of the pediment or the squatting lions of the railings. Always the same straggling white hair, and wandering beard; always the same threadbare coat buttoned so closely round the narrow and, I am fearful, shirtless breast; always the same timid glance over the shoulder at every passing footfall—glance eloquent of the sorrowful cowardice that is bred by poverty and debt; always the same ceaseless collation of tawny vellum and venerable folios. I grew strangely interested in my neighbour. I even fear that he interrupted my own work. I watched him furtively as I sat by his side, and I speculated on his past and on his present, and what he had been, and what he was doing. He was always in his place before I came. He never went out at noon as did many of his fellow-students, returning in half-an-hour with crumbs upon their coats. It always happened that when the Museum was closed for the night I lost sight of my old man. So at last matters went on till one day early in the third week of my work. I had formed a resolution almost unaccountably to myself to be beforehand with D. 8, and witness his entry, as well as the direction by which he should come. I was passing through one of the streets which connect New Oxford Street with the Strand, when I saw my old man emerge from a mean street, reeking with filth and resounding with the cries of ragged children, which opened into that along which I was walking. We met suddenly, and involuntarily I bowed. It was impossible to pass without recognition one by whose side I had sat for days, and by whose side I expected to sit for days again. The old man started with surprise. He coloured for an instant, and said:
“We meet sooner than usual, sir, this morning.”
After my bow, I was embarrassed. I was by no means clear that I had not committed an absurdity, in thus thrusting a salutation on a stranger. The old man’s tone was precisely that which is used by one who is perfectly self-possessed, and who, seeing another in embarrassment, and feeling himself master of the occasion, desires to double his victory by showing it. It was the old man who put me at my ease, and yet I should be conveying a false impression if I were to leave the idea that his manner indicated that mysterious acquaintance with the Shibboleths of society which is usually claimed for a hero in rags. My old man was courteous and gentle, but I cannot pretend to say that he was what is conventionally meant by a “gentleman”—that most inexplicable of words! He was possibly not the less a gentleman