Much of all this comes out through his
letters, which may be regarded as a department of his essays. He is an
old-fashioned letter-writer, the essence of the old fashion of
letter-writing lying, as with true essay-writing, in the dexterous
availing oneself of accident and circumstance, in the prosecution of
deeper lines of observation; although, just as with the record of his
conversation, one loses something, in losing the actual tones of the
stammerer, still graceful in his halting, as he halted also in
composition, composing slowly and by fits, "like a Flemish painter," as
he tells us, so "it is to be regretted," says the editor of his letters,
"that in the printed letters the reader will lose the curious varieties
of writing with which the originals abound, and which are scrupulously
adapted to the subject."
Also, he was a true "collector," delighting in the personal finding of a
thing, in the colour an old book or print gets for him by the little
accidents which attest previous ownership. Wither's _Emblems_, "that old
book and quaint," long-desired, when he finds it at last, he values none
the less because a child had coloured the plates with his paints.
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