private personalities, it cannot even report the obvious personalities
on the surface. Now there is one vivid and even bodily impression
of this kind which we have all felt when we met great poets
or politicians, but which never finds its way into the newspapers.
I mean the impression that they are much older than we thought they were.
We connect great men with their great triumphs, which generally
happened some years ago, and many recruits enthusiastic for the thin
Napoleon of Marengo must have found themselves in the presence
of the fat Napoleon of Leipzic.

I remember reading a newspaper account of how a certain rising politician
confronted the House of Lords with the enthusiasm almost of boyhood.
It described how his "brave young voice" rang in the rafters.
I also remember that I met him some days after, and he was considerably
older than my own father. I mention this truth for only one purpose:
all this generalisation leads up to only one fact--the fact that I once
met a great man who was younger than I expected.

. . . . .

I had come over the wooded wall from the villages about Epsom, and down
a stumbling path between trees towards the valley in which Dorking lies.
A warm sunlight was working its way through the leafage; a sunlight
which though of saintless gold had taken on the quality of evening.
It was such sunlight as reminds a man that the sun begins to set
an instant after noon. It seemed to lessen as the wood strengthened
and the road sank.

I had a sensation peculiar to such entangled descents;
I felt that the treetops that closed above me were the fixed