Heroes of the Telegraph

A clear and matter-of-fact thinker, Jenkin was an equally clear and graphic writer. He read the best literature, preferring, among other things, the story of David, the ODYSSEY, the ARCADIA, the saga of Burnt Njal, and the GRAND CYRUS. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Boccaccio, Scott, Dumas, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, were some of his favourite authors. He once began a review of George Eliot's biography, but left it unfinished. Latterly he had ceased to admire her work as much as before. He was a rapid, fluent talker, with excited utterance at times. Some of his sayings were shrewd and sharp; but he was sometimes aggressive. 'People admire what is pretty in an ugly thing,' he used to say 'not the ugly thing.' A lady once said to him she would never be happy again. 'What does that signify?' cried Jenkin; 'we are not here to be happy, but to be good.' On a friend remarking that Salvini's acting in OTHELLO made him want to pray, Jenkin answered, 'That is prayer.' Though admired and liked by his intimates, Jenkin was never popular with associates. His manner was hard, rasping, and unsympathetic. 'Whatever virtues he possessed,' says Mr. Stevenson, 'he could never count on being civil.' He showed so much courtesy to his wife, however, that a Styrian peasant who observed it spread a report in the village that Mrs. Jenkin, a great lady, had married beneath her. At the Saville Club, in London, he was known as the 'man who dines here and goes up to Scotland.' Jenkin was conscious of this churlishness, and latterly improved. 'All my life,' he wrote,'I have talked a good deal, with the almost unfailing result of making people sick of the sound of my tongue. It appeared to me that I had various things to say, and I had no malevolent feelings; but, nevertheless, the result was that expressed above. Well, lately some change has happened. If I talk to a person one day they must have me the next. Faces light up when they see me. "Ah! I say, come here." "Come and dine with me." It's the most preposterous thing I ever experienced. It is curiously pleasant.'