fessorship of
moral philosophy, that he obtained the position and the independence he
had long deserved. His enjoyment of the honor was brief. He died of
blood-poisoning, after an illness of only ten days, March 26, 1882.

Green's character was compounded of a variety of elements. The shyness
and reserve characteristic of many cultivated Englishmen, was
accentuated in his case by a natural austerity and an absorption in
serious thought. But though his temper was puritanic and inclined to
moroseness, there was no sourness or cynicism in it. "If," he wrote to
Miss Symonds, "I am rather a melancholy bird, given to physical fatigue
and depression, yet I have never known for a moment what it was to be
weary of life, as the youth of this age are fond of saying that they
are. The world has always seemed very good to me." Grim though he might
be outwardly, he had a keen sense of humor and a warmth of interest in
his fellows that made him, for those who broke through his reserve, a
charming companion. His most characteristic quality was elevation of
mind. In the essay that is here reprinted he speaks of "that aspiring
pride which arises from the sense of walking in intellect on the necks
of a subject crowd." Something of this elevation, this aloofness from
the vulgar, characterized all of his utterances and gave to them at
times a solemn fervency akin to that of the Hebrew prophets. This trait
is finely portrayed in the following description of the tutor Grey (a
thin disguise for Green) in Mrs. Ward's 'Robert Elsmere:'

"In after years memory could always recall to him at will the face
and figure of the speaker, the massive head, the deep eyes sunk
under the brows, the midland accent, the make of limb and features
which seemed to have some suggestion in them of the rude strength
and simplicity of a peasant ancestry; and then the nobility, the
fire, the spiritual beauty flashing through it all! Here, indeed,
was a man on whom his fellows might lean, a man in whom the
generation of spiritual force was so strong and continuous that it
overflowed of necessity into the poorer, barrener lives around him,
kindling and enriching."

Green's contributions to philosophy were partly constructive, partly
(and perhaps mainly) critical and destructive. On the critical side, his
greatest effort was his attack upon the philosophy of Hume in two
masterly Introductions to an edition of Hume's