I knew James Runciman but little, and that little for the most part
in the way of business. But no one could know that ardent and eager
soul at all, no matter how slightly, without admiring and respecting
much that was powerful and vigorous in his strangely-compounded
personality. His very look attracted. He had human weaknesses not
a few, but all of the more genial and humane sort; for he was
essentially and above everything a lovable man, a noble, interesting,
and unique specimen of genuine, sincere, whole-hearted manhood.
He was a Northumbrian by birth, "and knew the Northumbrian coast,"
says one of his North-Country friends, "like his mother's face." His
birthplace was at Cresswell, a little village near Morpeth, where he
was born in August, 1852, so that he was not quite thirty-nine when he
finally wore himself out with his ceaseless exertions. He had a true
North-Country education, too, among the moors and cliffs, and there
drank in to the full that love of nature, and especially of the sea,
which forms so conspicuous a note in his later writings. Heather and
wave struck the keynotes. A son of the people, he went first, in his
boyhood, to the village school at Ellington; but on his eleventh
birthday he was removed from the wild north to a new world at
Greenwich.
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