His dress was always unexceptionable.

Although he had lived so many years in Italy it was invariably of a decent clerical hue, but it never was hyperclerical.

He was a man not given to much talking, but what little he did say was generally well said.

His reading seldom went beyond romances and poetry of the lightest and not always most moral description.

He was thoroughly a _bon vivant_; an accomplished judge of wine, though he never drank to excess; and a most inexorable critic in all affairs touching the kitchen.