"I can never appreciate the value of an economic statement; I hardly know whether it is interesting." As he never talked for talking's sake, he was always ready to give his whole attention to the person he was talking to, or none at all; and consequently he never had a middle reputation--some praising his courtesy, as an old lady with whose querulous complaints about ingratitude and rheumatism he had borne and sympathized; others, his abrupt atrocious manner--"Turned his back on me with a scowl, and didn't say another word," as a sporting fast married lady said to me, who had attempted to tell him an improper story.

"I didn't mean to offend him; young men generally like it.

I hate a young man to be a prude and a Puritan.

Why, he isn't even going into the church, I understand!" One of his colleagues in the school where he was a master, told me that Arthur had once given him a most delicate and pointed rebuke on the practice into which he had fallen, of appealing to a boy's home feelings before the class.
"Some things ought to be said to people when they are alone; besides, we must not _seethe the kid in his mother's milk_." The same man told me that he heard him give a little address to the boys in his class, on the two main virtues of a schoolboy--purity and honesty--on the words, "And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords; and he said unto them, It is enough." Those are the only two anecdotes I have heard of his professional life, both illustrating that extraordinary gift of apt quotation and seeing unexpected connections, which, to my mind, is as adequate an external symbol of genius as can be found, though sometimes illusory.
He took the greatest delight in the society of children.

He writes-- "What wonderful lines those are of Tennyson's"-- they had just come out,--"'Who pleased her with a babbling heedlessness Which often lured her from herself!' There is nothing more absolutely refreshing when one is overdone or anxious, or oppressed by the vague anxieties of the world, than the conversation and the society of children, the unconscious ignoring of all grave possibilities, yet often accompanied by that curious tact which divines that all is not well with their older friend, and prompts them to employ all their resources to beguile it.