I was not an industrious student and knew only what I had found by act, and I had found "nothing I cared for after Titian??and Titian I knew chiefly from a copy of the supper of Emmaus in Dublin??till Blake and the Pre?Raphaelites;" and among my fathers friends were no Pre?Raphaelites. Some indeed had e to Bedford Park ihusiasm of the first building, and others to be hose that had. There was Todhunter, a well?off man who had bought my fathers pictures while my father was still Pre? Raphaelite.
Once a Dublin doctor he oet and a writer of poetical plays: a tall, sallow, lank, melanan, a good scholar and a good intellect; and with him my father carried on a warm exasperated friendship, fed I think by old memories and wasted by quarrels over matters of opinion. Of all the survivors he was the most dejected, and the least estranged, and I remember encing him, with a sense of worship shared, to buy a very expensive carpet designed by Morris. He displayed it without strong liking and would have agreed had there been any to find fault. If he had liked anything strongly he might have been a famous man, for a few years later he was to write, under some casual patriotic impulse, certain excellent verses now in all Irish anthologies; but with him every book was a new planting and not a new bud on an old bough. He had I think no pea himself. But my fathers chief friend was York Powell, a famous Oxford Professor of history, a broad?built, broad?headed, brown?bearded man, clothed in heavy blue cloth and looking, but for his glasses and the dim sight of a student, like some captain in the mert service. Oen passed with pleasure from Todhunters pany to that of one who was almost ostentatiously at peace. He cared nothing for philosophy, nothing for eiothing for the policy of nations, for history, as he saw it, was a memory of men who were amusing or exg to think about. He impressed all who met him & seemed to some a man of genius, but he had not enough ambition to shape his thought, or vi to give rhythm to his style, and remained always a poor writer. I was too full of unfinished speculations and premature vis to value rightly his versation, in?formed by a vast erudition, which would give itself to every casual association of speed pany precisely because he had her cause nor design. My father, however, found Powells crete narrative manner a necessary pletion of his own; and when I asked him, in a letter many years later, wherehe 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 Phaea court, an e and a skin of wi his side, blue mountains t behind; but who lived by drawing domestic ses and lovers meetings for a weekly magazihat had an immense circulation among the imperfectly educated. To escape the boredom of work, which he uro but under pressure of y, and usually late at night with the publishers messenger in the hall, he had half filled his studio with meical toys of his own iion, aually 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 attag and defending soldiers and a fortification that blew up wheackers fired a pea through a certain window; while a large model of a Thames barge hung from the ceiling