we had been out too late boating or skating.  And unless authority or substantial decorum was really threatened he was very lenient—­or rather had an amused sympathy with the irregularities that are mere matters of mischief or high spirits.  In lecture it was, mutatis mutandis, the same man.  Seeing, from his Remains, the “high view of his own capacities of which he could not divest himself,” and his determination not to exhibit or be puffed up by it, and looking back on his tutorial manner (I was in his lectures both in classics and mathematics), it was strange how he disguised, not only his sense of superiority, but the appearance of it, so that his pupils felt him more as a fellow-student than as the refined scholar or mathematician which he was.  This was partly owing to his carelessness of those formulae, the familiarity with which gives even second-rate lecturers a position of superiority which is less visible in those who, like their pupils, are themselves always struggling with principles—­and partly to an effort, perhaps sometimes overdone, not to put himself above the level of others.  In a lecture on the Supplices of Aeschylus, I have heard him say tout bonnement, “I can’t construe that—­what do you make of it, A.B.?” turning to the supposed best scholar in the lecture; or, when an objection was started to his mode of getting through a difficulty, “Ah!  I had not thought of that—­perhaps your way is the best.”  And this mode of dealing with himself and the undergraduates whom he liked, made them like him, but also made them really undervalue his talent, which, as we now see, was what he meant they should do.  At the same time, though watchful over his own vanity, he was keen and prompt in snubs—­playful and challenging retort—­to those he liked, but in the nature of scornful exposure, when he had to do with coarseness or coxcombry, or shallow display of sentiment.  It was a paradoxical consequence of his suppression of egotism that he was more solicitous to show that you were wrong than that he was right.

He also wanted, like Socrates or Bishop Butler, to make others, if possible, think for themselves.

However, it is not to be inferred that his conversation was made of controversy.  To a certain extent it turned that way, because he was fond of paradox. (His brother William used to say that he, William, never felt he had really mastered a principle till he had thrown it into a paradox.) And paradox, of course, invites contradiction, and so controversy.  On subjects upon which he considered himself more or less an apostle, he liked to stir people’s minds by what startled them, waking them up, or giving them “nuts to crack.”  An almost solemn gravity with amusement twinkling behind it—­not invisible—­and ready to burst forth into a bright low laugh when gravity had been played out, was a very frequent posture with him.