ABSTRACT
He gave his hearers the sense that he was in touch with the broken bones at Mai Dun,2 with the Romans buried in his garden and with the spirits of all the sad and the tormented that were still talked of in all the immense expanse of his territory. He had told a friend that he had material for work for another thirty years. [...]
So much of his memory was of the eagerness of Wessex in the wars with Napoleon that the tale of Waterloo was ever a fount of story in him. He had known a good many of the men who had been present at the battle. I cannot forget the remark of one of these (a cavalry man) to him: ‘I don’t remember much about the battle; but I’ll never forget the night before’ (pp. 221-2).
