citude for the students coming up from the country and smaller towns
to this populous centre, exposed to the moral perils of a great city,
that kept him strongly appealing for dormitories under University
supervision and control, an appeal to which we turned a strangely deaf
ear, but to which, we are thankful to say, he lived long enough to see a
fairly generous response.

"One hesitates to refer to the personal qualities that endeared him to
his intimate friends. I always detected in his life a certain undefined
loneliness. The scholar's shyness and the isolation of his exalted
position hardly account for it. A humanistic scholar in a University
where the practical departments were making greatest progress, engrossed
in his intellectual interests in the solitude of his upper chamber while
the busy commercial world went heedless by, always leisurely in the
midst of a most active life, a man of religious reticence who was
misunderstood because he did not make a noisy profession of his faith,
an old countryman in a new land that he never could quite call 'home,' a
controversialist skilled only in the use of the rapier and compelled at
times to enter the lists with those who wielded the bludgeon, a subtle
humourist who must 'carry on' with the prosaic and matter-of-fact, a
lover of his own fireside who must of necessity be socially advertised
with the vulgar, his spirit dwelt apart from the busy world in which he
served.

"Loyalty was the supreme virtue in his ethical code, and disloyalty was
to him the unpardonable sin. No man could have done for McGill what he
did and not make academic enemies. He found a group of professional
schools, each more or less autonomous, and he transformed it into a
University. His ideal of the unity of learning made it necessary that he
should run counter to the traditions of the various schools in seeking
to co-ordinate all departments of study, and he exposed himself to
criticism, just as President Eliot of Harvard did in his similar work
for his University; but I never heard him speak a disloyal word of any
of his colleagues. No man could have advocated Imperialism as he did
without making political enemies, and many a vigorous attack was made on
him by young Canadians; but I do not recall any spoken word or any
printed sentence of his that dragged his advocacy of Imperialism into
the realm of party politics or personal controversy. I know how true and
generous he was to one of his friend