DOWNING.
_6 July, 1902._
You repay me my letter with usurious interest. However you are _sui
juris_--or ought I to say _tui_?--and I doubt a court of equity would
extend to you the protection which it bestows on improvident young
gentlemen.
No I had nothing to write of Acton. A few memorable talks on Sunday
afternoons were all I had. To my great regret I did not hear the first
of the Eranus papers.... What the literary Nachlass is like I cannot
tell and am not likely to know. I saw the notes for an introductory
chapter[29] confided to Figgis. They seemed to me to be quite useless
in the hands of anyone save him who made them. They struck me as very
sad: the notes of a man who could not bring to the birth the multitude
of thoughts that were crowding in his mind.
Have you seen Sidgwick's small book on philosophy? I think it in some
respects the most Sidgwickian thing that is in print. I can hear most
of it--some of it from the hearth-rug or at the Eranus.
I think that the K.C.B. came to Stephen just at the right moment and
that he is really pleased by it. About his condition I don't know the
exact truth. The good thing is that there is little discomfort. He is
writing Ford Lectures for Oxford, but says that he will not be able
to deliver them. Have you seen in his _George Eliot_ the remark about
Edmund Gurney? "I have always fancied--though without any evidence,
that some touches in Deronda were drawn from one of her friends, Edmund
Gurney a man of remarkable charm of character and as good-looking as
Deronda" (p. 191). What think you?