to show attention
and hospitality, though Marriott's parties were as quaint as himself.
His breakfast parties in his own room were things to have seen--a crowd
of undergraduates, finding their way with difficulty amid lanes and
piles of books, amid a scarcity of chairs and room, and the host,
perfectly unconscious of anything grotesque, sitting silent during the
whole of the meal, but perfectly happy, at the head of the table. But
there was no claimant on his purse or his interest who was too strange
for his sympathy--raw freshmen, bores of every kind, broken-down
tradesmen, old women, distressed foreigners, converted Jews, all the odd
and helpless wanderers from beaten ways, were to be heard of at
Marriott's rooms; and all, more or less, had a share of his time and
thoughts, and perhaps counsel. He was sensible of worry as he grew
older; but he never relaxed his efforts to do what any one asked of him.
There must be even now some still living who know what no one else
knows, how much they owe, with no direct claim on him, to Charles
Marriott's inexhaustible patience and charity. The pains which he would
take with even the most uncongenial and unpromising men, who somehow had
come in his way, and seemed thrown on his charge, the patience with
which he would bear and condone their follies and even worse, were not
to be told, for, indeed, few knew what they were.

"He was always ready to be the friend of any one whose conduct gave
proofs of high principle, however inferior to himself in knowledge or
acquirements, and his friendship once gained was not easily lost. I
believe there was nothing in his power which he was not ready to do for
a friend who wanted his help. It is not easy to state instances of such
kindness without revealing what for many reasons had better be left
untold. But many such have come to my knowledge, and I believe there are
many more known only to himself and to those who derived benefit from
his disinterested friendship."[35]

Marriott's great contribution to the movement was his solid, simple
goodness, his immovable hope, his confidence that things would come
right. With much imaginativeness open to poetical grandeur and charm,
and not without some power of giving expression to feeling, he was
destitute of all that made so many others of his friends interesting as
men. He was nothing, as a person to know and observe, to the genius of
the two Mozleys, to the brilliant social charm of Frederic Fabe