Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/201

Rh introduction and appendices which enrich the Corpus Poeticum Boreale, while he had long had on the stocks a definitive edition of the Landnáma-boc (an historical work, generally known as the Book of Settlement), the completion of which his death makes doubtful. Multifarious interests filled and distracted a life into which little of method entered; hence, unlike his predecessors in the chair, the non-production of any work of high interest and importance. An omnivorous reader, nothing seemed to escape the meshes of his net. He remembered most of what he read, forgetting in the process more than the ordinary student ever knows, and carrying his vast load of knowledge without parade. It was all and ever at the disposal of any inquirer in whom the sincere quest after truth was apparent, be he friend or stranger, aristocrat or anarchist. In fact, this readiness to impart all that he knew was alike his peril and his charm; it took him off any scheme of consecutive work; it made him the idol of the very miscellaneous folk who crowded the Thursday night receptions of the most unconventional and most delightful of Dons—a Don whose dress and demeanour and outspoken views were a protest against the stiffness and exclusiveness of university and clerical coteries. He passed without effort from topic to topic between which there was not the smallest relation; from praise of George Meredith and Henry James and French poetry and French cathedrals to vivid narrative of famous fights, as of that between Sayers and Heenan; from enthusiasms over Japanese prints to talk on the best sources of history, not of England alone, but of any country that might be named, till the long talks from “evening wore to morning.” As a young fellow he had helped Communist refugees. Stepniak was one of his closest friends. Let a man from oversea bring some story of adventure and peril undergone, and York Powell would feast him at the “high table” in the historic hall of Christ Church, and then carry him off, with brief look-in at the “common room,” to his own den, whence would resound laughter that shook the walls within and sobriety without. Man of letters, he was, above all, man of action, and, in the denial to himself of the thing that he loved most, he found delight in the recital of deeds of the envied makers of history.

For the loss of so loveable a personality there is, there can be,