" To this dear
friend he was ever faithful, wearing to the day of his death an
octagonal gold ring engraved "Eliot. Jan: 1852." He would never
play the raconteur in general company, for he had a great horror of
repeating himself, and, latterly, of being looked upon as a bore by
younger men; but he loved to pour out reminiscences of the past to
an audience of one or two at most: "Let an old man gather his
recollections and glance at them under the right angle, and his
life is full of pantomime transformation scenes." The chief
characteristic of his wit was its unexpectedness; sometimes acrid,
sometimes humorous, his sayings came forth, like Topham Beauclerk's
in Dr. Johnson's day, like Talleyrand's in our own, poignant
without effort. His calm, gentle voice, contrasted with his
startling caustic utterance, reminded people of Prosper Merimee:
terse epigram, felicitous apropos, whimsical presentment of the
topic under discussion, emitted in a low tone, and without the
slightest change of muscle:
"All the charm of all the Muses
Often flowering in a lonely word." {25}
Questions he would suavely and often wittily parry or repel: to an
unhistorical lady asking if he remembered Madame Du Barry, he said,
"my memory is very imperfect as to the particulars of my life
during the reign of Lous XV.
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