to spend an hour every morning re-editing his notes and keeping his
index up to date. At his death, in 1902, he left five bound volumes,
with the contents dated and indexed, about 225 pages of closely
written sermon paper to each volume, and more than enough unbound and
unindexed sheets to made a sixth volume of equal size.

In accordance with his own advice to a young writer (p. 363 post), he
wrote the notes in copying ink and kept a pressed copy with me as a
precaution against fire; but during his lifetime, unless he wanted to
refer to something while he was in my chambers, I never looked at
them. After his death I took them down and went through them. I
knew in a general way what I should find, but I was not prepared for
such a multitude and variety of thoughts, reflections, conversations,
incidents. There are entries about his early life at Langar, Handel,
school days at Shrewsbury, Cambridge, Christianity, literature, New
Zealand, sheep-farming, philosophy, painting, money, evolution,
morality, Italy, speculation, photography, music, natural history,
archaeology, botany, religion, book-keeping, psychology, metaphysics,
the Iliad, the Odyssey, Sicily, architecture, ethics, the Sonnets of
Shakespeare. I thought of publishing the books just as they stand,
but too many of the entries are of no general interest and too many
are of a kind that must wait if they are ever to be published. In
addition to these objections the confusion is very great. One would
look in the earlier volumes for entries about New Zealand and
evolution and in the later ones for entries about the Odyssey and the
Sonnets, but there is no attempt at arrangement and anywhere one may
come upon something about Handel, or a philosophical reflection,
between a note giving the name of the best hotel in an Italian town
and another about Harry Nicholls and Herbert Campbell as the Babes in
the Wood in the pantomime at the Grecian Theatre. This confusion has