interest in such inquiries, frequently maintained some
position which to the quicker wits round him seemed
a paradox or a mare’s nest. Yet it often
happened that after a dispute, carried on with a brisk
fire of not always respectful objections to Marriott’s
view, and in which his only advantage was the patience
with which he clumsily, yet surely, brought out the
real point of the matter, overlooked by others, the
debate ended in the recognition that he had been right.
It was often a strange and almost distressing sight
to see the difficulty under which he sometimes laboured
of communicating his thoughts, as a speaker at a meeting,
or as a teacher to his hearers, or even in the easiness
of familiar talk. The comfort was that he was
not really discouraged. He was wrestling with
his own refractory faculty of exposition and speech;
it may be, he was busy deeper down in the recesses
and storehouses of his mind; but he was too much taken
up with the effort to notice what people thought of
it, or even if they smiled; and what he had to say
was so genuine and veracious, as an expression of
his meaning, so full of benevolence, charity, and
generosity, and often so weighty and unexpected, that
men felt it a shame to think much of the peculiarities
of his long look of blank silence, and the odd, clumsy
explanations which followed it. He was a man,
under an uncouth exterior, of the noblest and most
affectionate nature; most patient, indulgent, and
hopeful to all in whom he took an interest, even when
they sorely tried his kindness and his faith in them.
Where he loved and trusted and admired, he was apt
to rate very highly, sometimes too highly. His
gratitude was boundless. He was one of those who
deliberately gave up the prospect of domestic life,
to which he was naturally drawn, for the sake of his
cause. Capable of abstract thought beyond most
men of his time, and never unwilling to share his
thoughts with those at all disposed to venture with
him into deep waters, he was always ready to converse
or to discuss on much more ordinary ground. As
an undergraduate and a young bachelor, he had attained,
without seeking it, a position of almost unexampled
authority in the junior University world that was
hardly reached by any one for many years at least after
him. He was hopeless as a speaker in the Union;
but with all his halting and bungling speeches, that
democratic and sometimes noisy assembly bore from
him with kindly amusement and real respect what they
would bear from no one else, and he had an influence
in its sometimes turbulent debates which seems unaccountable.
He was the vir pietate gravis. In a once
popular squib, occasioned by one of the fiercest of
these debates, this unique position is noticed and
commemorated—
[Greek: Oud’ elathen Mariota, philaitaton Oreiaelon]
* * * * *
[Greek: Aelthe mega gronon,
Masichois kai pas’ agapaetos,
Kai smeilon, prosephae pantas keindois epeesin].[33]