ine and veracious, as an expression of his meaning, so full of
benevolence, charity, and generosity, and often so weighty and
unexpected, that men felt it a shame to think much of the peculiarities
of his long look of blank silence, and the odd, clumsy explanations
which followed it. He was a man, under an uncouth exterior, of the
noblest and most affectionate nature; most patient, indulgent, and
hopeful to all in whom he took an interest, even when they sorely tried
his kindness and his faith in them. Where he loved and trusted and
admired, he was apt to rate very highly, sometimes too highly. His
gratitude was boundless. He was one of those who deliberately gave up
the prospect of domestic life, to which he was naturally drawn, for the
sake of his cause. Capable of abstract thought beyond most men of his
time, and never unwilling to share his thoughts with those at all
disposed to venture with him into deep waters, he was always ready to
converse or to discuss on much more ordinary ground. As an undergraduate
and a young bachelor, he had attained, without seeking it, a position of
almost unexampled authority in the junior University world that was
hardly reached by any one for many years at least after him. He was
hopeless as a speaker in the Union; but with all his halting and
bungling speeches, that democratic and sometimes noisy assembly bore
from him with kindly amusement and real respect what they would bear
from no one else, and he had an influence in its sometimes turbulent
debates which seems unaccountable. He was the _vir pietate gravis_. In a
once popular squib, occasioned by one of the fiercest of these debates,
this unique position is noticed and commemorated--

[Greek: Oud' elathen Mariota, philaitaton Oreiaelon]

* * * * *

[Greek: Aelthe mega gronon, Masichois kai pas' agapaetos,
Kai smeilon, prosephae pantas keindois epeesin].[33]

His ways and his talk were such as to call forth not unfrequent mirth
among those who most revered him. He would meet you and look you in the
face without speaking a word. He was not without humour; but his jokes,
carried off by a little laugh of his own, were apt to be recondite in
their meaning and allusions. With his great power of sympathy, he yet
did not easily divine other men's lighter or subtler moods, and odd and
sometimes even distressing mistakes were the consequence. His health was
weak, and a chronic tenderness of throat