topics of English literature, or of current intellectual interest. Few Italians had so thoroughly mastered our idiom, or were so much at home among our great writers or the more select publications of the passing season. Here also the zest of his conversation arose perhaps in part from his being an Italian-from his importing into our colloquies a mode of thought which, though it must in the main have belonged to him individually, was in part to be attributed to his Italian nature. He was not expansive, or particularly fluent, as a talker, but, on the contrary, terse and ready to be silent; and, unless you were tête-à-tête with him, it was not the impetuosity of anything he said that struck you, but a certain character of wise and simple sententiousness, with frequently a turn of very fine humour. In no man's conversation that I have known did the movement of mind which intimate talk with one or two others excites end more usually in one of those deep little pools, mysteriously still, at the bottom of which, as the cause of the depth and the stillness, there is some compact and often-cogitated maxim of experimental wisdom. And the habit of mind which appeared in this characteristic was evident also in the nature of his tastes and preferences when the conversation ran on the books which we knew in common. Through it he fastened on much that we should have neglected or passed by but for the certificate given to it by his liking and recommendation. Thus, while his admiration of Shakespeare was as free and transcendent as that of any Englishman, it would happen again and again that the phrases or the passages which he had brought away in his memory from his last solitary readings in Shakespeare, or which he had noted with a view to consult us as to some difficulty in the interpretation, were not such phrases and passages as were familiar to the public mouth, or likely ever to be so, but those in which he had detected some little profundity of philosophy, heretofore unnoticed, but the value of which could not be doubtful after his commentary. And,

as he thus sometimes probed for us into the less-known parts of Shakespeare, so sometimes, among the publications of the day, a book would come into his way, his peculiar regard for which would at once accredit it to us, and predispose us to read it with proper expectation. One such book was an English translation of Ulrici's German work on Shakespeare. It had little or no popular success at the time, was pronounced dull and heavy by such of our critics as noticed it, and is now forgotten, or hardly to be met with. But Ruffini found in it a book after his own heart-indubitably the deepest and truest exposition, as he thought, of Shakespeare's dramatic method, and also the best collection of brief commentaries on the several plays. Another publication in which, at the time of its appearance, Ruffini was unusually interested, was "Blanco White's Autobiography." It was with such books as these, selected by his peculiar taste out of the current of each year's publications, that he varied his readings in the few established favourites that were nearest at hand on his shelf. To this place of honour he promoted, during one whole winter, a volume of Kant, to be taken up every now and then for regular study until he should have thoroughly digested it. Not only while he was thus engaged, but at other times, he was ready enough to enter on those discussions of extreme metaphysical or religious perplexity to which the talk of intimate friends, if they are serious with each other at all, ought surely to lead. At such times, it need hardly be said, speculations would be exchanged, and expressions of conviction and of sentiment would fall from his lips, not of a nature to be divulged at random all round at mid-day from an Edinburgh house-top. It was in an upper room that we sat, well roofed in by ourselves for our fireside chat late into the winter's night; and, only on stepping to the window and drawing aside the blind, could we see the slopes of the city around and underneath, descending as a vast embankment or valley of darkness towards the north, with hundreds

of lights irregularly twinkling in the gloom.

At the heart, however, of all our multiform liking for Ruffini on such various grounds as have yet been mentioned, and not only at the heart of all, but interfused through all as a warmer and subtler element of affection, was our experience of his singular efficiency in the character of a friend and counsellor in matters of personal concern. It was strange to see how, in a Scottish city, so many persons, the circumstances of whose lives were different enough from anything native to Italy, were drawn to this Italian, this alien, and found in him, far more than in each other, a confidant to whom they could entrust what was of deepest and most private interest to them. What was it in him that fitted him so rarely for this delicate function? I am not sure but that here also part of his qualification lay in what might at first sight have appeared a disqualification his Italianism. Are not natives of the southern lands, and particularly Italians, distinguished from ourselves by the greater amount of immediate feeling and of immediate intellectual invention which they expend upon the incidents of common life, upon the little problems which arise in one's daily relations with society, or with individuals of either sex? Is not this what we mean when we speak of their sensitiveness, of the poignancy with which they feel things, of their sudden flushes of passion and of resentment of slights or wrongs? With us, of the northern races, comparative insouciance is the habit, unless on those extreme occasions when the limits of endurance are reached, and one all-confusing rage fills the mind and breaks down its partitions. Even in sentimental matters we drift along in great leagues and breadths of reverie; we do not, in this region, entertain and manoeuvre individual incidents as they occur with half the excitability, or with half the expertness, of the Italian. Hence, the most practical of nations as the English are in the kinds of affairs usually included in the term "business," there are other

veins of affairs-and those constituting for many frequently, and for all occasionally, more truly the essence of life than the "business" that embeds them in which the practicality of the English is numb and clownish as compared with that of which the Italian is often a master. Applying this observation, whatever it may be worth, to our present purpose, one may say that, wherever among ourselves an Italian may be found who unites superior ability with a character intrinsically high and honourable, the chances are that there will have been developed in him, by the series of his past expe riences, such an instinctive intelligence of affairs and possible situations, such a subtlety of penetration, such a facility of inferring the whole of a case from a part, such a tact and exactness of sympathy, as will make him invaluable to those about him in the best offices of a casuist and confessor. Whether there may not be a hint here at the rationale of the success in English society of Italian father-confessors of a very different sort, Heaven knows, from that to which our Ruffini belonged, I will not stop to inquire. But, if I were to think of the good ideal of a fatherconfessor-not as a wily professional, not as having any drift of his own, not as seeking the office, but as having it thrust upon him, a good deal to his own discomfort, by a little circle of friends Iwho had discovered his wisdom and worth in the office-then it would be of Ruffini that I should think. I can see him yet, sitting as it were in the middle of us, receiving our visits independently one after another; each having something now and then to consult him about-both those who were settled in life, and his seniors or equals in age, and whose references to him would be about matters of a maturer family-kind, and those younger ones among us to whom a man of between thirty and forty might more naturally be a Mentor. What penetration he had; how he understood a case half-told; how gravely he would nod in silence for a time as he listened; and then how distinct the

farther questioning, and how exact the judgment! And no feigning or flattery! He would wound, if necessary; he would use the scalpel; he would blame ; there were times when he was purposely harsh--when, falling back on a little dissertation on some course of conduct, or way of thinking, the prevalence of which among men in general he had always marked for reprobation as weak or evil, he would give his patient to understand that he detected too much of that in the present instance. But, at other times, what tenderness in his treatment, what thoughtfulness in his sympathy, what anxiety to see the matter brought to a right issue, and, if it was possible for him, what willingness to take personal trouble to that end, and to interpose by letter or personally! In this way I suppose he was made the depositary of the confidences of many more people than could have been related to each other in any other way than through such common indebtedness to him. Each was sure of him, and that what was entrusted to Ruffini was safe under more than sacerdotal seal. Of course, in that little fraternity of which I have spoken as more particularly recognising each other as Ruffinians, there was so much of common acquaintance with each other's affairs that, when they met with Ruffini among them, the limits of secrecy were narrowed to those matters appertaining to each which they had severally chosen to confide to Ruffini only, and there was plenty of scope for free colloquy, still of a confidential kind, among all alike. We could banter each other in an esoteric way about this or that; we could criticise our neighbours, or absentees of our own set; we could relapse into that deshabille and abandon of ideas, humours, and whimsies, which make gatherings of friends delightful, and in which it is wonderful to see what resources for chat and genuine fellowship there are away from the inventoried topics of politics and books. There was that in Ruffini which made him competent to a host's place even in these little revels of friendly sense and nonsense intermixed; and I can

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member how gracefully he regulated them, and how, without speaking much himself, he would always keep up with what was going, and, by an anecdote, a pithy comment, a momentary phantasy of humour, impart to the whole a flavour which was characteristic of his presence.

There is no family, or fraternity of friends, as every one knows, that has not its own little stock of phrases, proverbs, catch-words, images, and bits of rhyme, invented within itself, and invested with associations which make them keen and full of meaning within the circle of the initiated, though out of that circle they might seem meaningless or common. Our Ruffinian fraternity in Edinburgh was no exception; and, of the phrases which went to and fro among us, there were not a few of which Ruffini was the real or putative father: It happened, for example, that one of us-a friend of Ruffini who may perhaps read this, and to whom it is not the sole debt of gratitude I owe that through him I first came to know Ruffini-it happened that this friend had come into possession of an oriental ring, having an inscription on it, cut on an emerald, in characters which no one at hand could decipher. The German theologian, Tholuck, having come to Edinburgh on a visit, the ring was shown to him; whereupon it became known that the inscription was in Syriac, and might be interpreted, "This too will pass." Here was a flash from the East for Ruffini. He appropriated the saying; we voted it to be his; and again and again it would come from him, in this or in that fresh application, as an ultimate word of his philosophy. "This is your agony now, this your annoyance; SO we may expand what the Syriac sage meant: "grievous it is, and it cannot but occupy you; but you have had agonies and annoyances before this one, and where are they now? Well, Time has not ceased to flow, and this too will pass!" Very Syriac comfort this, perhaps, but it suited Ruffini; nor, after his first appropriation of the aphorism, did it ever need to be expanded. The

four words, "This too will pass," were sufficient in themselves.- -Another saying, which came to be proverbial among us, but which will not, I fear, become current in the world in the profound sense we gave to it, originated in one of our excursions to the Pentlands. One of us, who had taken his rod and fishing-tackle with him, persisted in fishing a pond in the hollow among the moors, while the rest strolled about hither and thither. Still, as we came back at intervals to the edge of the pond, there was our friend fishing assiduously, but with not a fish to show for his trouble. He was a most determined fisher, one of the most skilful fishers in Scotland; and he would, I believe, have been fishing there to this very hour, but for a simple question put by Ruffini on perhaps our thirteenth visit to the water's edge, when the afternoon light was beginning to gather over the brown moors, and still there was no fish in the basket or on the bank. To most of us our friend's non-success was of no very deep concern; and we had amusement and revenge enough by furtively abstracting his brandy-flask from his basket, and setting it up on the bank (not till it was empty) to be aimed at with stones, till an exact hit or two smashed the glass into shivers within the wicker-work. But Ruffini had laid the entire matter to heart, and was meditating. "How is it?" he at last said aloud after regarding the fisher for a while with unwearied benevolence,"how is it that no fish are caught by Frank? Is it that there are no fish?" It had occurred to him that our friend might have been for some hours the victim of a hallucination, and that the pond might be destitute of what he was soliciting from it so painfully. Laughed over at the time as a simplicity, the question was moralized by us afterwards into applications quite away from ponds among the Pentlands. Whenever we heard of any kind of labour that had been meritorious but fruitless, our question was stereotyped, "Is it because there are no fish?"---Yet another of these sillysweet reminiscences. We were teasing

Ruffini one evening in his own rooms on the subject of his bachelorship; and, after various forms of the nonsense, we tried him with a variety of one of Boswell's questions to Johnson. We supposed that a baby were brought to him, and that, by inexorable conditions, he was bound to take charge of it himself, and always to have it under his own eye in the room where we were sitting. "What would you do with it, Ruffini?" we asked. "O, I would put it in the coal-scuttle there, poor thing, and give it a pipe." Necessarily, Ruffini's imp-baby in the coal-scuttle was always after that a visionary presence in our colloquies; and to this day I cannot see a coal-scuttle of a particular shape without thinking how conveniently it would hold a baby that had learnt to smoke. As visionary as the baby in the coal-scuttle was a certain great book which Ruffini would speak of with mockmystery as containing everything conceivable among its contents, elaborated into the most perfect possible form, and which he used to call "My novel," or more fully, "My novel, which I am going to write." going to write." It was always spoken of, with utter confusion of tenses, as an achieved reality which had yet to come into existence. Were some person of eccentric character talked of, "Yes, he is a very strange character," Ruffini would say, "and I have put him in my novel which I am going to write." Did some discussion arise which it was desirable to stop, "Ah! you should see," would be Ruffini's way of stopping it, "how wonderfully that is all settled in my novel -my novel which I am going to write." And so on in other cases, till this opus magnum which existed somewhere, if its author could but get at it, became our ideal repository of all the historical knowledge, all the philosophy, all the ethics, and all the poetry yet attainable in the world. In so the world. In so jesting with himself there was, moreover, I doubt not, a kind of covert sarcasm upon the exaggerated estimate set by most people upon bookmakers and book-making, and upon any early dreams he may himself have had in that direction. Not in that form was Ruf

fini to leave any monument of himself of which bibliographers could take cognisance. A little Italian tale which he had written hastily while in London, and had got a friend to publish in Italy with a view to its producing a small sum that would then have been acceptable, had been suppressed by the police on the chancediscovery of the authorship. He amused himself now and then in Edinburgh with an Italian song or sonnet; and there may be copies of some of those fine Ruffinian sonnets among his friends, and of one or two of the exquisite songs, without his name, on stray music-sheets. Once, to oblige a friend, he wrote a paper in English, which was printed with other papers in a volume. But there was something hard and laborious in his written English, as compared with his graceful use of our language in speech, and I do not think he would ever have attained, in this fashion, the simple and easy excellence of his brother Giovanni.

With many lonely hours, notwithstanding the frequency about him of so many attached friends, and with thoughts. revolving in his mind in those hours which none of these friends could altogether penetrate or share, Ruffini had reconciled himself, as I have said, to the prospect of a residence in Edinburgh for the rest of his days. His lot, as an exile, had so far fallen not ill, and not a sign anywhere in the political sky augured the likelihood of a change. Accordingly, when, in 1847, I left Edinburgh, it was with no thought that there would be a farther break in the fraternity by the more important loss to it of Ruffini. From amid new scenes and associations in London my thoughts would still revert to him among the rest, as sitting in the well-known upper room, or trudging along George Street with his cane, and, mayhap, if the weather were all the worse, and the cold moist winds were coming in mist up the Firth from the east, shivering with the cruel usage, and twinged in body and in spirit. There would be an occasional letter from him, but in none anything significant of a change

at hand for him or for Italy, unless one were inclined to prophesy rather wildly from certain liberal proceedings of the mild new Pope, Pio Nono. But the year 1848 came, and that memorable moment in 1848 came when, going down the Strand, I saw placards in the windows of the news-shops, "Abdication of Louis-Philippe," and the thrill ran through me at the words which ran through thousands of others. And then there came the muffled roar of revolutions, and from every land in Europe a sound as of multitudes huzzahing and armies on the tramp, and one knew that an era had arrived of vicissitudes swifter than at the recent rate, and of mutual reckonings and revenges between peoples and governments. And in the midst, on the lovely Mediterranean land that interested one most, one saw the Italian populations all uprisen, and the despots cowering white-faced at their palace gates, and swearing constitutions or anything, and, wonder of wonders! one who had hitherto been a despot, the sombre Piedmontese king, coming forward like a man at the end of his life, and dashing his recreant past into oblivion, and, on some inspiration of God or of his better ambition, summoning the Italians to his standard, and throwing down his gauntlet to the Austrian. And one grew dizzy with gazing on the turmoil and observing all the effects. Some of the effects were homely enough-as, for example, when Italian exiles in our own cities broke up their little domiciles, and tended, by ones, twos, and threes, to the mother-land that had need of them, or would at least receive them now if they came. And this effect enacted itself with more of public attention than usual in the case of one refugee in Edinburgh. There came a day when there was a sale of Ruffini's funiture, and the tradespeople with whom he had had dealings bought little articles of the furniture as mementoes of him, and he prepared to take leave of the streets and the friends that for eight years had been fond of him. Although he made jests on the smallness of the contribu