Excerpt from The Leaves of the Tree, Vol. 3: Studies in Biography IN this volume, I exhibit a little gallery of portraits. The only conditions imposed upon me were that they Should be portraits of men whom I had known well enough to describe with some degree of personal vivacity, and that they Should also be people the effect of whose influence and character I had to some extent experienced not mere remote figures, whom I had seen like statues at the ends of vistas, with everlasting gestures of frozen emotion, or whose voices I had publicly heard conversing or expostulating, persuading or explaining; but actual persons, whose remarks had been addressed sincerely or intimately to myself, and with whom I had been in some sort of direct relation. This was a grateful task, and one which I accepted with genuine delight. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.