teresting letter in which the
Solicitor-General describes his last recollections of Keble:--

There was, I am sure, no trace of failing then to be discerned in
his apprehension, or judgment, or discourse. He was an old man who
had been very ill, who was still physically weak, and who needed
care; but he was the same Mr. Keble I had always known, and whom,
for aught that appeared, I might hope still to know for many years
to come. Little bits of his tenderness, flashes of his fun,
glimpses of his austerer side, I seem to recall, but I cannot put
them upon paper.... Once I remember walking with him just the same
short walk, from his house to Sir William's, and our conversation
fell upon Charles I., with regard to whose truth and honour I had
used some expressions in a review, which had, as I heard,
displeased him. I referred to this, and he said it was true. I
replied that I was very sorry to displease him by anything I said
or thought; but that if the Naseby letters were genuine, I could
not think that what I said was at all too strong, and that a man
could but do his best to form an honest opinion upon historical
evidence, and, if he had to speak, to express that opinion. On
this he said, with a tenderness and humility not only most
touching, but to me most embarrassing, that "It might be so; what
was he to judge of other men; he was old, and things were now
looked at very differently; that he knew he had many things to
unlearn and learn afresh; and that I must not mind what he had
said, for that in truth belief in the heroes of his youth had
become part of him." I am afraid these are my words, and not his;
and I cannot give his way of speaking, which to any one with a
heart, I think, would have been as overcoming as it was to me.

This same carelessness about appearances seems to us to be shown in
Keble's theological position in his later years. A more logical, or a
more plausible, but a less thoroughly real man might easily have
drifted into Romanism. There was much in the circumstances round him,
in the admissions which he had made, to lead that way; and his
chivalrous readiness to take the beaten or unpopular side would help
the tendency. But he was a man who gave great weight to his instinctive
perception of what was right and wrong; and he was also a man who, when
he felt sure of his duty, did not care a straw