depreciation of mere intellect compared with the less showy excellences of faithfulness to conscience and duty; and a horror and hatred of everything that seemed like display or the desire of applause or of immediate effect.  Intellectual depreciators of intellect may deceive themselves, and do not always escape the snare which they fear; but in Isaac Williams there was a very genuine carrying out of the Psalmist’s words:  “Surely I have behaved and quieted myself; I refrain my soul and keep it low, as a child that is weaned from his mother.”  This fear of display in a man of singularly delicate and fastidious taste came to have something forced and morbid in it.  It seemed sometimes as if in preaching or talking he aimed at being dull and clumsy.  But in all that he did and wrote he aimed at being true at all costs and in the very depths of his heart; and though, in his words, we may wish sometimes for what we should feel to be more natural and healthy in tone, we never can doubt that we are in the presence of one who shrank from all conscious unreality like poison.

From Keble, or, it may be said, from the Kebles, he received his theology.  The Kebles were all of them men of the old-fashioned High Church orthodoxy, of the Prayer Book and the Catechism—­the orthodoxy which was professed at Oxford, which was represented in London by Norris of Hackney and Joshua Watson; which valued in religion sobriety, reverence, and deference to authority, and in teaching, sound learning and the wisdom of the great English divines; which vehemently disliked the Evangelicals and Methodists for their poor and loose theology, their love of excitement and display, their hunting after popularity.  This Church of England divinity was the theology of the old Vicar of Coln St. Aldwyn’s, a good scholar and a good parish priest, who had brought up his two sons at home to be scholars; and had impressed his solid and manly theology on them so strongly that amid all changes they remained at bottom true to their paternal training.  John Keble added to it great attainments and brilliant gifts of imagination and poetry; but he never lost the plain, downright, almost awkward ways of conversation and manner of his simple home—­ways which might have seemed abrupt and rough but for the singular sweetness and charm of his nature.  To those who looked on the outside he was always the homely, rigidly orthodox country clergyman.  On Isaac Williams, with his ethical standard, John Keble also impressed his ideas of religious truth; he made him an old-fashioned High Churchman, suspicious of excitement and “effect,” suspicious of the loud-talking religious world, suspicious of its novelties and shallowness, and clinging with his whole soul to ancient ways and sound Church of England doctrine reflected in the Prayer Book.  And from John Keble’s influence he passed under the influence of Thomas Keble, the Vicar of Bisley, a man of sterner type than his brother, with strong and definite opinions on all subjects; curt and keen