Having accompanied Sir Richard Burton to the meridian of his fame, we may fitly pause a moment and ask what manner of a man he was at this moment. Though sixty-five, and subject to gout, he was still strong and upright. He had still the old duskened features, dark, piercing eyes, and penthouse brows, but the long and pendulous Chinaman moustaches had shrunk till they scarcely covered his mouth. The "devil's jaw" could boast only a small tuft of hair. There were wrinkles in "the angel's forehead." If meddlesome Time had also furrowed his cheeks, nevertheless the most conspicuous mark there was still the scar of that great gash received in the ding-dong fight at Berbera. His hair, which should have been grizzled, he kept dark, Oriental fashion, with dye, and brushed forward. Another curious habit was that of altering his appearance. In the course of a few months he would have long hair, short hair, big moustache, small moustache, long beard, short beard, no beard. Everyone marked his curious, feline laugh, "made between his teeth." The change in the world's treatment of him, and in his circumstances, is noticeable to his countenance. In photographs taken previous to 1886 his look betrays the man who feels that he has been treated neglectfully by an ungrateful world for which he had made enormous sacrifices. Indeed, looking at the matter merely from a pecuniary standpoint, he must have spent at least £20,000 of his own money in his various explorations. He is at once injured, rancorous, sullen, dangerous. All these pictures exhibit a scowl. In some the scowl is very pronounced, and in one he looks not unlike a professional prize-fighter. They betray a mind jaundiced, but defiant. A restless, fiery soul, his temper, never of the best, had grown daily more gnarled and perverse. Woe betide the imprudent human who crossed him! What chance had anybody against a man who had the command of all the forcible words in twenty-eight languages! His peremptory voice everywhere ensured obedience. To all save his dearest friends he was proud and haughty. Then came the gold shower. There was actually a plethora of money. The world, so long irreconcilable, had acknowledged his merits, and the whole man softened. The angelical character of the forehead gradually spread downwards, and in time tempered even the ferocity of the terrible jaw. It was the same man, but on better terms with himself and everybody else. We see him sitting or strolling in his garden with quite a jaunty air—and when there is a cigar in his mouth, the shadow of which modifies still more the characteristics of that truculent region, it is hard to believe that we are looking at the same man. He has a youthful vigour, an autumnal green. In one photograph Lady Burton, devoted as ever to her husband, is seen nestling at his side and leaning her head against his shoulder. She had grown uncomfortably stout and her tight-fitting dress was hard put to it to bear the strain. Her glorious hair was now grown gray and thin, and it was generally hidden by a not very becoming big yellowish wig with curls, which made her look like a magnified Marie Antoinette.

Burton's chief pleasure in his garden was feeding the birds. They used to wait for him in flocks on an almond tree, and became "quite imperious in their manners if he did not attend to them properly." He loved the sparrow especially, for Catullus' sake.

His gigantic personality impressed all who met him. Conversation with him reduced the world from a sphere to a spherule. It shrank steadily—he had traversed so much of it, and he talked about out-of-the-way places so familiarly. As of old, when friends stayed with him he never wanted to go to bed, and they, too, listening to his learned, animated and piquant talk, were quite content to outwatch the Bear. As an anthropologist his knowledge was truly amazing. "He was also a first-rate surgeon and had read all the regular books." 505 People called him, for the vastness of his knowledge, the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He looked to the past and the future. To the past, for no one was more keenly interested in archaeology. He delighted to wander on forlorn moors among what Shelley calls "dismal cirques of Druid stones." To the future, for he continued to study spiritualism, and to gaze into crystals. He longed to make himself master of the "darkling secrets of Eternity." 506 Both he and Lady Burton were, to use Milton's expression, "struck with superstition as with a planet." She says: "From Arab or gipsy he got.... his mysticism, his superstition (I am superstitious enough, God knows, but he was far more so), his divination." 507 Some of it, however, was derived from his friendship in early days with the painter-astrologer Varley. If a horse stopped for no ascertained reason or if a house martin fell they wondered what it portended. They disliked the bodeful chirp of the bat, the screech of the owl. Even the old superstition that the first object seen in the morning—a crow, a cripple, &c.—determines the fortunes of the day, had his respect. "At an hour," he comments, "when the senses are most impressionable the aspect of unpleasant spectacles has a double effect." 508 He was disturbed by the "drivel of dreams," and if he did not himself search for the philosopher's stone he knew many men who were so engaged (he tells us there were a hundred in London alone) and he evidently sympathised with them.

Fear of man was a feeling unknown to him, and he despised it in others. "Of ten men," he used to say, quoting an Osmanli proverb, "nine are women." Behind his bed hung a map of Africa, and over that a motto in Arabic which meant:

This saying he used to observe, was always a consolation to him.

If he had been eager for money, it was only for what money would buy. He wanted it because it would enable him to do greater work. "I was often stopped, in my expeditions," he told Dr. Baker, "for the want of a hundred pounds." He was always writing: in the house, in the desert, in a storm, up a tree, at dinner, in bed, ill or well, fresh or tired,—indeed, he used to say that he never was tired. There was nothing histrionic about him, and he never posed, except "before fools and savages." He was frank, straightforward, and outspoken, and his face was an index of his mind. Every thought was visible just "as through a crystal case the figured hours are seen." He was always Burton, never by any chance any one else. As. Mr. A. C. Swinburne said of him: "He rode life's lists as a god might ride." Of English Literature and especially of poetry he was an omnivorous reader. He expressed warm admiration for Chaucer, "jolly old Walter Mapes," Butler's Hudibras, and Byron, especially Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, with its allusions to his beloved Tasso, Ariosto and Boccaccio. Surely, however, he ought not to have tried to set us against that tender line of Byron's,

by pointing out that the accent of Arqua is rightly on the second syllable, and by remarking: "Why will not poets mind their quantities in lieu of stultifying their lines by childish ignorance." 510 Then, too, he savagely attacked Tennyson for his "rasher of bacon line"—"the good Haroun Alraschid," 511 Raschid being properly accented on the last syllable. Of traveller authors, he preferred "the accurate Burckhardt." He read with delight Boswell's Johnson, Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands, Renan's Life of Jesus, Gibbon, whom he calls "our great historian" 512 and the poems of Coleridge. At Cowper he never lost an opportunity of girding, both on account of his Slave Ballads 513 and the line:

"Cowper," he comments, "had evidently never seen a region untouched by the human hand." It goes without saying that he loved "his great namesake," as he calls him, "Robert Burton, of melancholy and merry, of facete and juvenile memory." Of contemporary work he enjoyed most the poems of D. G. Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. John Payne and FitzGerald's Rubaiyat, and we find him praising Mr. Edmund Gosse's lyrics. Of novelists Dickens was his favourite. He called Darwin "our British Aristotle." Eothen 515 was "that book of books." He never forgave Carlyle for denouncing The Arabian Nights as "downright lies" and "unwholesome literature;" Miss Martineau, as an old maid, was, of course, also out of court. If she had written Shakespeare, it would have been all the same. He enjoyed a pen and ink fight, even as in those old Richmond School days he had delighted in fisticuffs. "Peace and quiet are not in my way." And as long as he got his adversary down he was still not very particular what method he employed.

Unlike so many of his fellow-countrymen, he was a lover or art, and had visited all the galleries in Europe. "If anyone," he used to say, "thinks the English have the artistic eye, let him stand in the noblest site in Europe, Trafalgar Square, and look around." On another occasion he described the square as "the nation's last phase of artistic bathos." The facade of the National Gallery was his continual butt.

A fine handwriting, he said, bespoke the man of audacity and determination; and his own might have been done with a pin. Then he used to split his words as if they were Arabic; writing, for example, "con tradict" for contradict. When young ladies teased him to put something in their albums he generally wrote:

which may be translated:

Another of his favourite sayings against women was the Persian couplet:

which may be rendered:

Zan meaning "woman" and also "beat," and ma-zan "beat not."

There was in Burton, as in most great men, a touch of the Don Quixote, derived, no doubt, in his case, from his father. He was generous and magnanimous, and all who knew him personally spoke of him with affection. He was oftenest referred to as "a dear chap." Arbuthnot regarded him as a paladin, with no faults whatever. When younger he had, as we have noticed, never undervalued a good dinner, but as he advanced in years, everything—food, sleep, exercise—had to give way before work.