met him & seemed to some a man of genius, but he had not enough
ambition to shape his thought, or conviction to give rhythm to his
style, and remained always a poor writer. I was too full of
unfinished speculations and premature convictions to value rightly
his conversation, in-formed by a vast erudition, which would give
itself to every casual association of speech and company precisely
because he had neither cause nor design. My father, however, found
Powell's concrete narrative manner a necessary completion of his
own; and when I asked him, in a letter many years later, where he
got his philosophy, replied 'From York Powell' and thereon added,
no doubt remembering that Powell was without ideas, 'By looking at
him.' Then there was a good listener, a painter in whose hall hung
a big picture, painted in his student days, of Ulysses sailing
home from the Phaeacian court, an orange and a skin of wine at his
side, blue mountains towering behind; but who lived by drawing
domestic scenes and lovers' meetings for a weekly magazine that
had an immense circulation among the imperfectly educated. To
escape the boredom of work, which he never turned to but under
pressure of necessity, and usually late at night with the
publisher's messenger in the hall, he had half filled his studio
with mechanical toys of his own invention, and perpetually
increased their number. A model railway train at intervals puffed
its way along the walls, passing several railway stations and
signal boxes; and on the floor lay a camp with attacking and
defending soldiers and a fortification that blew up when the
attackers fired a pea through a certain window; while a large
model of a Thames barge hung from the ceiling. Opposite our house
lived an old artist who worked also for the illustrated papers for
a living, but painted landscapes for his pleasure, and of him I
remember nothing except that he had outlived ambition, was a good