One of the best private chess-players I used often to encounter,--but almost never to beat, is my old life-friend, Evelyn of Wotton, now the first M.P. for his own ancestral Deptford. It was to me a triumph only to puzzle his shrewdness, "to make him think," as I used to say,--and if ever through his carelessness I managed a stale, or a draw,--very seldom a mate,--that was glory indeed. If he sees this, his memory will countersign it.
Let so much suffice, as perhaps a not inappropriate word about the Literary Life's frequent mental recreation, especially, where the player is, like Moses, "not a man of words."
One day, by the by, this text in the original, "lo ish devarim anochi" (Exod. iv. 10), came to my lot in Pusey's Hebrew class, to my special confusion: but every tutor was very considerate and favoured the one who couldn't speak, and Mr. Biscoe in particular used to say when my turn came to read or to answer,--"Never mind, Mr. Tupper, I'm sure you know it,--please to go on, Mr. So-and-So." This habitual confidence in my proficiency had the effect of forcing my consciousness to deserve it; and it usually happened that I really did know, silently, like Macaulay's cunning augur, "who knew but might not tell."
Speaking of recreation, Izaak Walton's joy as a contemplative man has been mine from youth; as witness these three fishing sonnets, just found in the faded ink of three or four decades ago, which may give a gleam of country sunshine on a page or two, and would have rejoiced my piscatorial friends Kingsley and Leech in old days, and will not be unacceptable to Attwood Matthews, Cholmondeley Pennell, and the Marstons with their friend Mr. Senior in these. I have had various luck as an angler from Stennis Lake to the Usk, from Enniskillen to Killarney, from Isis to Wotton,--and so it would be a pity if I omitted such an authorial characteristic; especially as my stammering obliged me to "study to be quiet."
"Look, like a village Queen of May, the stream Dances her best before the holiday sun, And still, with musical laugh, goes tripping on Over these golden sands, which brighter gleam To watch her pale-green kirtle flashing fleet Above them, and her tinkling silver feet That ripple melodies: quick,--yon circling rise In the calm refluence of this gay cascade Marked an old trout, who shuns the sunny skies, And, nightly prowler, loves the hazel shade: Well thrown!--you hold him bravely,--off he speeds, Now up, now down,--now madly darts about,-- Mind, mind your line among those flowering reeds,-- How the rod bends,--and hail, thou noble trout!"