, I had been
influenced, not influencing; and at no time have I acted on others,
without their acting upon me. As is the custom of a University, I had
lived with my private, nay, with some of my public, pupils, and with the
junior fellows of my College, without form or distance, on a footing of
equality. Thus it was through friends, younger, for the most part, than
myself, that my principles were spreading. They heard what I said in
conversation, and told it to others. Under-graduates in due time took
their degree, and became private tutors themselves. In their new
_status_, they in turn preached the opinions, with which they had
already become acquainted. Others went down to the country, and became
curates of parishes. Then they had down from London parcels of the
Tracts, and other publications. They placed them in the shops of local
booksellers, got them into newspapers, introduced them to clerical
meetings, and converted more or less their Rectors and their brother
curates. Thus the Movement, viewed with relation to myself, was but a
floating opinion; it was not a power. It never would have been a power,
if it had remained in my hands. Years after, a friend, writing to me in
remonstrance at the excesses, as he thought them, of my disciples,
applied to me my own verse about St. Gregory Nazianzen, "Thou couldst a
people raise, but couldst not rule." At the time that he wrote to me, I
had special impediments in the way of such an exercise of power; but at
no time could I exercise over others that authority, which under the
circumstances was imperatively required. My great principle ever was,
Live and let live. I never had the staidness or dignity necessary for a
leader. To the last I never recognized the hold I had over young men. Of
late years I have read and heard that they even imitated me in various
ways. I was quite unconscious of it, and I think my immediate friends
knew too well how disgusted I should be at such proceedings, to have the
heart to tell me. I felt great impatience at our being called a party,
and would not allow that we were such. I had a lounging, free-and-easy
way of carrying things on. I exercised no sufficient censorship upon the
Tracts. I did not confine them to the writings of such persons as agreed
in all things with myself; and, as to my own Tracts, I printed on them a
notice to the effect, that any one who pleased, might make what use he
would of them, and reprint them with alterations if he