student of the
Bible."

With devotional feeling--with everything that showed reverence and godly
fear--he cordialized wherever and in whomsoever it was found,--Pagan or
Christian, Romanist or Protestant, bond or free; and while he disliked,
and had indeed a positive antipathy to intellectual mysticism, he had a
great knowledge of and relish for such writers as Dr. Henry More,
Culverwel, Scougall, Madame Guyon, whom (besides their other qualities)
I may perhaps be allowed to call affectionate mystics, and for such
poets as Herbert and Vaughan, whose poetry was pious, and their piety
poetic. As I have said, he was perhaps too impatient of all obscure
thinking, from not considering that on certain subjects, necessarily in
their substance, and on the skirts of all subjects, obscurity and
vagueness, difficulty and uncertainty, are inherent, and must therefore
appear in their treatment. Men who rejoiced in making clear things
obscure, and plain things the reverse, he could not abide, and spoke
with some contempt of those who were original merely from their standing
on their heads, and tall from walking upon stilts. As you have truly
said, his character mellowed and toned down in his later years, without
in any way losing its own individuality, and its clear, vigorous,
unflinching perception of and addiction to principles.

His affectionate ways with his students were often very curious: he
contrived to get at their hearts, and find out all their family and
local specialities, in a sort of short-hand way, and he never forgot
them in afterlife; and watching him with them at tea, speaking his mind
freely and often jocularly upon all sorts of subjects, one got a glimpse
of that union of opposites which made him so much what he was--he gave
out far more liberally to them the riches of his learning and the deep
thoughts of his heart, than he ever did among his full-grown brethren.
It was like the flush of an Arctic summer, blossoming all over, out of
and into the stillness, the loneliness, and the chill rigor of winter.
Though authoritative in his class without any effort, he was indulgent
to everything but conceit, slovenliness of mind and body, irreverence,
and above all handling the Word of God deceitfully. On one occasion a
student having delivered in the Hall a discourse tinged with
Arminianism, he said, "That may be the gospel according to Dr.
Macknight, or the gospel according to Dr. Taylor of Norwich, but it is
no