any of these things with him, the discussion was pretty sure to end, not indeed with any insincere concession of what he thought right and true, but in consideration for individuals and depreciation of himself.

And the same thing comes out in the interesting 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 about what the world thought of appearances, or required as a satisfaction of seeming consistency.  In him was eminently illustrated the characteristic strength and weakness of English religion, which naturally comes out in that form of it which is called Anglicanism; that poor Anglicanism, the butt and laughing-stock of all the clever and high-flying converts to Rome,