any friendships were based on a common knowledge of this one
person. Indeed, the geniality, elevation, and simplicity of his
character gave him a quite unusual hold on those who had come to know
him well. Few men, leading an equally quiet and studious life, have
inspired so much regard and affection in so large a number of persons;
few teachers have had an equal power of stimulating and attracting
their pupils. He loved teaching hardly less than he loved the
investigation of truth, and he was the most faithful and sympathetic
of friends, one who was felt to be unique while he lived and
irreplaceable when he had departed.

I have spoken of the courage he had shown in confronting his
antagonists in the ecclesiastical courts. That courage did not fail
him in the severer trials of his last illness. The nature of the
disease of which he died was disclosed to him by his physician in
September 1892, while an international Congress of Orientalists, in
which he presided over the Semitic section, was holding its meetings.
A festival dinner was being given in honour of the Congress the same
afternoon. When the physician had spoken, Smith simply remarked, "This
means the death my brother died" (one of his brothers had been struck
by the same malady a few years before). He went straight to the
dinner, and was throughout the evening the gayest and brightest of the
guests.

Fancy sometimes indulges herself in imagining what part the eminent
men one has known would have played had their lot been cast in some
other age. So I have fancied that Archbishop Tait (described in an
earlier chapter) ought to have been Primate of England under Edward
the Sixth or Elizabeth. He would have guided the course of reform more
prudently and more firmly than Cranmer did; he would have shown a
broader spirit than did Parker or Whitgift. So Cardinal Manning, had
he lived in the seventeenth century, might haply have become General
of the Jesuit Order, and enjoyed the secret control of the politics of
the Catholic world. So Robertson Smith, had he been born in the great
age of the mediaeval universities, might, like the bold dialectician of
whom Dante speaks, have "syllogised invidious truths"[50] in the
University of Paris; or had Fortune placed him two centuries later
among the scholars of the Italian Renaissance in its glorious prime,
the fame of his learning might have filled half Europe.

-----

[48] No life of Robertson Smith has yet been writt