settle at Oxford, only
twenty-four in fact; and, though occasionally honoured by invitations
from Heads of Houses and Professors, I naturally lived chiefly with
undergraduates and junior Fellows, such as Grant, Sellar, Palgrave,
Morier, and others. Grant, afterwards Sir Alexander Grant and
Principal of the University of Edinburgh, was a delightful companion.
He had always something new in his mind, and discussed with many
flashes of wit and satire. He possessed an aristocratic contempt for
anything commonplace, or self-evident, so that one had to be careful
in conversing with him. But he was generous, and his laugh reconciled
one to some of his sharp sallies. How little one anticipates the
future greatness of one's friends. They all seem to us no better than
ourselves, when suddenly they emerge. Grant had shown what he could do
by his edition of Aristotle's _Ethics_. He became one of the
Professors at the new University at Bombay and contributed much to the
first starting of that University, so warmly patronized by Sir Charles
Trevelyan. On returning to this country he was chosen to fill the
distinguished place of Principal of the Edinburgh University. More was
expected of him when he enjoyed this _otium cum dignitate_, but his
health seemed to have suffered in the enervating climate of India,
and, though he enjoyed his return to his friends most fully and
spending his life as a friend among friends, he died comparatively
young, and perhaps without fulfilling all the hopes that were
entertained of him. But he was a thoroughly genial man, and his
handshake and the twinkle of his eye when meeting an old friend will
not easily be forgotten.

Sellar was another Scotchman whom I knew as an undergraduate at
Balliol. When I first came to know him he was full of anxieties about
his health, and greatly occupied with the usual doubts about religion,
particularly the presence of evil or of anything imperfect in this
world. He was an honest fellow, warmly attached to his friends; and no
one could wish to have a better friend to stand up for him on all
occasions and against all odds. He afterwards became happily married
and a useful Professor of Latin at Edinburgh. I stayed with him later
in life in Scotland and found him always the same, really enjoying his
friends' society and a talk over old days. He had begun to ail when I
saw him last, but the old boy was always there, even when he was
miserable about his chiefly imaginary mi