Victorian age. His smiling, tenderly expressed disapprobation of various
modern authors was enchanting. John Keats's verses were monstrous
pretty, but over-ornamented. A little too much lucent syrup tinct
with cinnamon, don't you think? The poetry of Shelley might have been
composed in the moon by a slightly deranged, well-meaning person. If you
wanted a sound mind in a sound metrical body, why there was Mr. Pope's
"Essay on Man." There was something winsome and by-gone in the general
make-up of Tom Folio. No man living in the world ever seemed to me to
live so much out of it, or to live more comfortably.

At times I half suspected him of a convalescent amatory disappointment.
Perhaps long before I knew him he had taken a little sentimental
journey, the unsuccessful end of which had touched him with a gentle
sadness. It was something far off and softened by memory. If Tom Folio
had any love-affair on hand in my day, it must have been of an airy,
platonic sort--a chaste secret passion for Mistress Peg Woffington or
Nell Gwyn, or possibly Mr. Waller's Saccharissa.

Although Tom Folio was not a collector--that means dividends and bank
balances--he had a passion for the Past and all its belongings, with
a virtuoso's knowledge of them. A fan painted by Vanloo, a bit of rare
Nankin (he had caught from Charles Lamb the love of old china), or an
undoctored stipple of Bartolozzi, gave him delight in the handling,
though he might not aspire to ownership. I believe he would willingly
have drunk any horrible decoction from a silver teapot of Queen Anne's
time. These things were not for him in a coarse, materialistic sense;
in a spiritual sense he held possession of them in fee-simple. I learned
thus much of his tastes one day during an hour we spent together in the
rear showroom of a dealer in antiquities.