On the other hand, Mr. Ward, with the greatest good-humour, was unreservedly defiant and aggressive.  There was something intolerably provoking in his mixture of jauntiness and seriousness, his avowal of utter personal unworthiness and his undoubting certainty of being in the right, his downright charges of heresy and his ungrudging readiness to make allowance for the heretics and give them credit for special virtues greater than those of the orthodox.  He was not a person to hide his own views or to let others hide theirs.  He lived in an atmosphere of discussion with all around him, friends or opponents, fellows and tutors in common-rooms, undergraduates after lecture or out walking.  The most amusing, the most tolerant man in Oxford, he had round him perpetually some of the cleverest and brightest scholars and thinkers of the place; and where he was, there was debate, cross-questioning, pushing inferences, starting alarming problems, beating out ideas, trying the stuff and mettle of mental capacity.  Not always with real knowledge, or a real sense of fact, but always rapid and impetuous, taking in the whole dialectical chess-board at a glance, he gave no quarter, and a man found himself in a perilous corner before he perceived the drift of the game; but it was to clear his own thought, not—­for he was much too good-natured—­to embarrass another.  If the old scholastic disputations had been still in use at Oxford, his triumphs would have been signal and memorable.  His success, compared with that of other leaders of the movement, in influencing life and judgment, was a pre-eminently intellectual success; and it cut two ways.  The stress which he laid on the moral side of questions, his own generosity, his earnestness on behalf of fair play and good faith, elevated and purified intercourse.  But he did not always win assent in proportion to his power of argument.  Abstract reasoning, in matters with which human action is concerned, may be too absolute to be convincing.  It may not leave sufficient margin for the play and interference of actual experience.  And Mr. Ward, having perfect confidence in his conclusions, rather liked to leave them in a startling form, which he innocently declared to be manifest and inevitable.  And so stories of Ward’s audacity and paradoxes flew all over Oxford, shocking and perplexing grave heads with fear of they knew not what.  Dr. Jenkyns, the Master of Balliol, one of those curious mixtures of pompous absurdity with genuine shrewdness which used to pass across the University stage, not clever himself but an unfailing judge of a clever man, as a jockey might be of a horse, liking Ward and proud of him for his cleverness, was aghast at his monstrous and unintelligible language, and driven half wild with it.  Mr. Tait, a fellow-tutor, though living on terms of hearty friendship with Ward, prevailed on the Master after No. 90 to dismiss Ward from the office of teaching mathematics.  It seemed a petty step thus to mix up theology with mathematics, though it was not so absurd as it looked, for Ward brought in theology everywhere, and discussed it when his mathematics were done.  But Ward accepted it frankly and defended it.  It was natural, he said, that Tait, thinking his principles mischievous, should wish to silence him as a teacher; and their friendship remained unbroken.