out, as it were, his ground notion of it.  This was the first ebauche of his criticism; but you felt after its details without quite finding them.  In a word, the impression was precisely the uneasy impression you feel after the first reading of one of his sermons or lectures,—­that there is a very grand general conception, but that you do not see how it is going to “fay in” in its respective parts.  One of the students intimated some such doubt regarding some of the opening verses,—­and there at once appeared enough to show how frank was the relation, in that class at least, between the teacher and the pupils.  Then began the real work and the real joy of the evening.  Then on the background he had washed in before he began to put in his middle-distance, and at last his foreground, and, last of all, to light up the whole by a set of flashes, which he had reserved, unconsciously, to the close.  He dropped his forehead on his hand, worked it nervously with his fingers, as if he were resolved that what was within should serve him, went over the whole chapter in much more detail a second time, held us all charged with his electricity, so that we threw in this, that, or another question or difficulty,—­till he fell back yet a third time, and again went through it, weaving the whole together, and making part illustrate part under the light of the comment and illumination which it had received before,—­and so, when we read it with him for the fourth and last time, it was no longer a string of beads,—­a set of separate verses,—­Jewish, antiquated, and fragmentary,—­but one vivid illustration of the “peace which passeth all understanding” into which the Christian man may enter.

With this fortunate illustration and exposition of the worth and work of the Working-Men’s College my connection with it closed.  It seems to me a beautiful monument of the love and energy of its founder.  Perhaps we are all best known through our friends, or, as the proverb says, “by the company we keep.”  Let the reader know Mr. Maurice, then, by remembering that he is the godfather of Tennyson’s son,—­

  “Come, when no graver cares annoy,
  Godfather, come and see your boy,”—­

that Charles Kingsley has a Frederic Maurice among his children,—­and that Thomas Hughes has a Maurice also.  The last was lost, untimely, from this world, in bathing in the Thames.  The magnetism of such a man has united the group of workers who have formed the Working-Men’s College.  We need not wonder that with such a spirit it succeeds.

EMANCIPATION IN RUSSIA.