gratitude for the pleasure he had given them, and were quitting the
room, when one, halting at the door, said timidly, "But, Mr. Green,
what did you say was really the origin of our ideas?" However,
whether they were or were not capable of assimilating his doctrines,
his pupils all joined in their respect for him. They felt the
loftiness of his character, they recognised the fervour of his belief.
He was the most powerful ethical influence, and perhaps also the most
stimulative intellectual influence, that in those years played upon
the minds of the ablest youth of the University. But it was a singular
fact, which those who have never lived in Oxford or Cambridge may find
it hard to understand, that when he rose from the post of a college
tutor to that of a University professor, his influence declined, not
that his powers or his earnestness waned, but because as a professor
he had fewer auditors and less personal relation with them than he had
commanded as a college teacher. Such is the working of the collegiate
system in Oxford, curiously unfortunate when it deprives the ablest
men, as they rise naturally to the highest positions, of the
opportunities for usefulness they had previously enjoyed.

As his powers developed and came to be recognised, so did those slight
asperities which had been observed in undergraduate days soften down
and disappear. Though he lived a retired life, his work brought him
into contact with a good many people, and he became more genial in
general company. I remember his saying with a smile when I had lured
him into Wales for a short excursion, "I don't know whether it is a
sign of declining virtue, but I find as I grow older that I am less
and less fond of my own company." From the first he had won the
confidence and affection of his pupils. Many of them used long
afterwards to say that his conduct and his teaching had been the one
great example or one great influence they had found and felt in
Oxford. The unclouded happiness of his married life made it easier for
him to see the bright side of things, and he could not but enjoy the
sense that the seed he sowed was falling on ground fit to receive it.
Even when ill-health had fastened on him, and was checking both his
studies and his public work, it did not affect the evenness of his
temper nor sharpen the edge of his judgments of others. In earlier
days these had been sometimes austere, though expressed in temperate
and measured terms.

I m