R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

270 W. E. Heitlandwas chiefly known as a champion of the so-called Old-Catholics and a Vegetarian Food-reformer. Thus it befelthat a passion for heaping-up and never clearing-up, inuncritical innocence treating all details as of equal value(this was a grave defect in an official examiner), made theProfessorship in his hands a nullity. Yet his simpletolerance and his personal charm silenced censure andmade him a saintly figure, revered to the last. I needhardly say that he was at the mercy of servants and othersubordinates. In two cases his simplicity was exploitedby Germans to their own profit. A characteristic episodewas the disappearance of a Latin dictionary crammedwith manuscript additions, the fruit of years. Such aloss was irreparable, so he offered a reward of £5 for itsrecovery. It struck his gyp that he (the gyp) had useda large book to prop up the Professor's bed, a leg ofwhich was broken. In the joy of happy restitution thecash reward seemed but a trivial portion of the owner'sgratitude. That the experience might conceivably recur,was warmly rejected as the suggestion of unworthycynicism. One of the fancies of his old age was an impulseto rescue others from oblivion by writing their biographies.With great difficulty he was prevented frompublishing a Life of Dr Luard the Registrary. But onIsaac Todhunter he lavished all the resources of researchand imagination. Though not an intimate friend of thehero, he spun out a wonderful analysis of his characterand motives with naive indiscretion, distressing to thefamily. The pamphlet of sixty pages (1884) is a literarycuriosity of the first order. Enthusiasm, irrelevant andoften grotesque, expressed in English of singular graceand purity, surely never outdid itself with more success.One specimen may well be quoted. Speaking of Todhunter'slove of animals, he says, ' For dogs in general hemanifested little sympathy, distrusting their self-control '.