nless
addressed as 'Mr.' who does not know which are the Pastoral Epistles,
or who is the Bishop of Durham (then Bishop Westcott)?"

'He could not remember the name of his best friend on occasions, and he
would recount with real glee how he had been known successfully to
introduce two men, not knowing the name of either. On one occasion it
fell to him to introduce to each other a low-caste West African native
and a particularly high-caste Brahmin rejoicing in a lofty sounding
polysyllabic title: of course he transposed the names--with results, so
he declared, almost fatal to himself.

'He would display with humorous pride to his athletic friends a
photograph of himself coming in second in a toboggan handicap race at
St. Moritz, which he always maintained he morally won. He was full of
spontaneous humour. When he greeted you, when he looked at you, when
he talked with you, it was always with a half smile on his face. It
was his sense of humour which procured him a quick entrance into many a
man's life and heart. It was his sense of humour which made the
hostile undergraduate, hauled for cutting lectures or chapels, forget
his hostility and the presence of the don; though at the end of the
interview he, probably for the first time, began to think whether
chapel-going had any meaning, whether a lecture, if listened to, might
conceivably profit the listener. It was his sense of humour which made
all feel at home with him, which at the first attracted the most
unlikely men, {49} which inspired with confidence the shyest, and made
the most frivolous and thoughtless not afraid of him. Yet while he
would laugh, and make us laugh, for as long as ever any one wished,
through all his unaffected merriment he made men feel the strange
earnestness of his life. And all knew that, while he never obtruded on
us religious or even serious matters, he was ready at a moment's notice
to speak with us of spiritual things. And most men felt something of
what a friend of his wrote of him after his death: "He understood of
'the things that matter' more than any man that I shall ever meet."
And many men who owe to Forbes Robinson their first serious thoughts of
and their first insight into "the things that matter" must feel the
same. It is this fact that makes it impossible to measure the
far-reaching deep influence of his life. For the greatness of that
life lay not in any large influence on any large body of
undergraduates, though