contributing to the _Athenaeum_ columns headed "Folk-Lore"--a word coined
by him for the purpose. The correspondence which grew out of this
threatened to swamp other departments of the paper, and so the project was
formed of starting a journal entirely devoted to the subjects which he had
been treating. Mr. Dilke, being consulted, approved the plan, and lent it
his full support. In 1872, when Mr. Thorns retired from control of the
paper, Sir Charles Dilke bought it, putting in Dr. Doran as editor; and
thenceforward it was published from the same office as the _Athenaeum_.]
and to the _Athenaeum_ never ceased; though so unambitious of any personal
repute was he that in all his long career he never signed an article with
his own name, nor identified himself with a pseudonym. A man of letters,
he loved learning and literature for their own sake; yet stronger still
than this love was his desire to transmit to his heirs his own gathered
knowledge, experience, and convictions.

He had become early 'an antiquary and a Radical,' and this combination
rightly indicated unusual breadth of sympathy. The period in which he was
born favoured it: for, keen student as he was of the eighteenth century--
preserving in his own style, perhaps later than any other man who wrote in
England, that dignified but simple manner which Swift and Bolingbroke had
perfected--he yet was intimately in touch with the young genius of an age
in revolt against all the eighteenth-century tradition. Keats, only a few
years his junior, was his close friend; so was John Hamilton Reynolds, the
comrade of Keats, and author of poems known to every student of that
literary group. Thomas Hood and Charles Lamb had long and near association
with him. Lover of the old, he had always an open heart for the new; and,
bookish though he was, no one could be less a bookworm. The antiquary in
him never mastered the Radical: he had an unflagging interest in the large
facts of life, an undying faith in human progress. Slighting his own
lifework as he evidently did--for he never spoke of it to his son or his