most seasonably out of season. His talk without affectation was
compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity.
Like grains of fine gold, his sentences would beat out into whole
sheets. He had small mercy on spurious fame, and a caustic
observation on the FASHION FOR MEN OF GENIUS was a standing dish.
Sir Thomas Browne was a 'bosom cronie' of his; so was Burton, and
old Fuller. In his amorous vein he dallied with that peerless
Duchess of many-folio odour; and with the heyday comedies of
Beaumont and Fletcher he induced light dreams. He would deliver
critical touches on these, like one inspired, but it was good to
let him choose his own game; if another began even on the
acknowledged pets he was liable to interrupt, or rather append, in
a mode difficult to define whether as misapprehensive or
mischievous. One night at C-'s, the above dramatic partners were
the temporary subject of chat. Mr. X. commended the passion and
haughty style of a tragedy (I don't know which of them), but was
instantly taken up by Elia, who told him 'THAT was nothing; the
lyrics were the high things--the lyrics!'


One side of his literary career deserves especial notice. Modern
journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any man
of the early part of this century. He was the pioneer of Asiatic
prose, and delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous
exaggerations. To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals the
subject is one of the highest achievements of an important and much
admired school of Fleet Street leader-writers, and this school
Janus Weathercock may be said to have invented. He also saw that
it was quite easy by continued reiteration to make the public
interested in his own personality, and in his purely journalistic