Life and letters of Thomas Hodgkin / by Louise Creighton.

  • Thomas Hodgkin
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Life and letters of Thomas Hodgkin / by Louise Creighton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of different tastes. He was much interested in his children’s friends, and especially he shared in a wonderful way his daughter Violet’s friends. He said to her once in her girl¬ hood, as she showed him her birthday presents and told him about the friends who had sent them, ‘ You seem to have struck oil in friends.’ With one of these friends, Mary Coleridge, he read Hebrew and shared many interests in poetry and art. Another, Paula Schuster, let him use her London house almost as his own whenever it suited him, and filled him with gratitude for her beautiful hospitality. With a third, Edith Sichel, he leapt into friendship in a moment, owing to their common historical studies. She said of him once, * He wears his learning like a rose in his cap.’ Another of his younger friends in later years was Henry Newbolt, who, with wife and children, was a regular summer visitor. These children gave the first radiant promise of joys to come, before Hodgkin was blessed with grandchildren of his own. The children’s father, more than any other of those who knew Hodgkin in later years, had the power of making his host become for the time being the same age as himself, as they discussed together the many topics—political, literary, historical—in which they were both interested. Hodgkin’s hospitality was unlimited. Friends, old and new, were always welcome at his house. He was a perfect host, able both to entertain his guests at times and to leave them to themselves at other times, able, too, to go on with his own work during their visits, so that they had no cause to feel themselves a burden on his time. But his many friends added to the ever-increasing burden of his correspondence. People of all kinds, many of them personally unknown, wrote to him about historical, archaeo¬ logical, religious, social, and political questions. Many are the groans in his diary over the burden of his correspond¬ ence, which sat heavily upon him. He called it ' the great and unprofitable burden of my life.’ ‘ Nobody writes such interesting letters as I do or receives such dull ones,’ he said sometimes. That his correspondents thoroughly en¬ joyed his letters and found them helpful and sympathetic, is shown by the nature of their answers to him. Each year new correspondents were added to the already immense