Tom Folio was a cheerful, lonely man--a recluse even when he allowed
himself to be jostled and hurried along on the turbulent stream of
humanity sweeping in opposite directions through Washington Street and
its busy estuaries. He was in the crowd, but not of it. I had so little
real knowledge of him that I was obliged to imagine his more intimate
environments. However wide of the mark my conjectures may have fallen,
they were as satisfying to me as facts would have been. His secluded
room I could picture to myself with a sense of certainty--the couch (a
sofa by day), the cupboard, the writing-table with its student lamp, the
litter of pamphlets and old quartos and octavos in tattered bindings,
among which were scarce reprints of his beloved Charles Lamb, and
perhaps--nay, surely--an _editio princeps_ of the "Essays."
The gentle Elia never had a gentler follower or a more loving disciple
than Tom Folio. He moved and had much of his being in the early part
of the last century. To him the South-Sea House was the most important
edifice on the globe, remaining the same venerable pile it used to be,
in spite of all the changes that had befallen it.
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