and clothed it with colour. His curiosity
remained inexhaustible. His delight in visiting a new country was like
that of an American scholar landing for the first time in Europe. A
friend met him a year before his death at a hotel in the North of
England, and found he was going to the Isle of Man. He had mastered
its geography and history, and talked about it and what he was to
explore there as one might talk of Rome or Athens when visiting them
for the first time. When anybody told him an anecdote his susceptible
imagination seized upon points which the narrator had scarcely
noticed, and discovered a whole group of curious analogies from other
times or countries. Whatever you planted in this fertile soil struck
root and sprouted at once. Morally, he impressed those who knew him
not only by his kindness of heart, but by a remarkable purity and
nobleness of aim. Nothing mean or small or selfish seemed to harbour
in his mind. You might think him right or wrong, but you never doubted
that he was striving after the truth. He was not merely a just man; he
loved justice with passion. It was partly, perhaps, because justice,
goodness, honour, charity, seemed to him of such paramount importance
in life that he made little of doctrinal differences, having perceived
that these virtues may exist, and may also be found wanting, in every
form of religious creed or philosophical profession. When the
Convocation of the Anglican Church met at Westminster, it was during
many years his habit to invite a great number of its leading members
to the deanery, the very men who had been attacking him most hotly in
debate, and who would go on denouncing his latitudinarianism till
Convocation met again. They yielded--sometimes reluctantly, but still
they yielded--to the kindliness of his nature and the charm of his
manner. He used to dart about among them, introducing opponents to one
another, as indeed on all occasions he delighted to bring the most
diverse people together, so that some one said the company you met at
the deanery were either statesmen and duchesses or starving curates
and briefless barristers.

He had on the whole a happy life. It is true that the intensity of his
attachments exposed him to correspondingly intense grief when he lost
those who were dearest to him; true also that, being by temperament a
man of peace, he was during the latter half of his life almost
constantly at war. But his home, first in the lifetime of his moth