Eustace Talbot : born 1 Sept. 1873. Died 26 May 1905 some recollections / [Gwendolen Stephenson, Walter Morley Fletcher, M. R. J].

  • Stephenson, Gwendolen.
Date:
[1908]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Eustace Talbot : born 1 Sept. 1873. Died 26 May 1905 some recollections / [Gwendolen Stephenson, Walter Morley Fletcher, M. R. J]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    agree in the general drift of what I have been saying; though without affectation, there are many who would have said it more effectively. But details have their place in such recollections as these, as well as general impressions; and it is the presentment of these that is the real difficulty; so few are the episodes that are not too formless and vague to be transfen-ed to writing. Yet, small as they are, they must be put down, and the more frivolous first. Nothing was pleasanter, I used to think, than to w'atch Eustace listening to the disquisitions of James McBryde (now to God passed) with a sort of surprised delight in his fertility of imagina- tion and powers of description. They were both artists in language. Eustace’s vocabulary was the more allusive and literary : he had a constantly varying stock of phrases—some derived from Pickwick, others from his I.ondon patients, which were a constant joy. “ He knows a trick worth a good half-dozen of that” was one of the Pickwick texts which I account peculiarly his own. “ It’s the ’orrible [bronchitis or other disorder], doctor” was a favourite hospital phrase, accompanied by the spreading of an expansive hand over his chest. “An old one, but worth trying” was the invariable rebuke when his opponent at picquet made a miscalcula- tion, which W81S, naturally, always attributed to design. There was a pleasantry of long standing connected with some cigars in my possession upon which Eustace considered that he had a lien. He took it very ill if they were offered to anyone else, usually inquiring suspiciously whether Owen Smith or AValter Fletcher had been “at them,” and receiving an answer in the affirmative with severe disapproval: then selecting one with much shaking of the head and protrusion of the lower lip, and consuming it perhaps with an air of injury: or, if mollified, with the hand spread out over his chest, and other expressions of enjoyment. I only had one experience of him as a travelling companion.
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