MY [Guy Boas] father lived till the age of ninety-five and was still working. He looked so old when I was young, and so young when I was old that he never seemed to change.... In 1896, the year I was born, he published Shakespeare and his Predecessors—'Such a good book,' said an old lady, `it saves reading Shakespeare.' So unworldly was my father that he thought that £40 which he received on publication was all he would get. He was amazed when royalties in due course followed which brought him a pleasant annual sum for over fifty years. In 1952, when he was over ninety, he signed an agreement to write a book on Sir Philip Sidney, which appeared when he was ninety-three, and he contributed his last review to the Times Literary Supplement within a fortnight of his death. When the Supplement celebrated its half-century with a sherry party the editor introduced my father to a startled American as `Dr. Boas, our oldest contributor. He is an Elizabethan.' 'It's not quite as bad as that.' I explained, for the American seemed looking for the doublet and hose.

My father was a man of great dignity, wisdom, charm, and friendliness. His literary industry was prodigious, yet he wore his scholarship lightly. . . . `I never knew such a reader,' said my mother. `When the conductor gives him his ticket in the train, he turns it over and reads the back.'