"I think she was right. I am glad of it."

"I told her if I left her then, it would be only to hunt up the true facts of the case, and then I should come back for my reward. I little thought how strangely the discovery would come about, and through no act of mine."

We were in the garden again, pacing the walk as we did the former time. "Did she promise you conditionally?" I asked.

"No. She told me to go away and forget her; that it was all impossible. She had chosen her work, she said, and I must remember mine, and marry to please my mother, and stuff of that sort. But now I am going back."

"At once?

"Perhaps not straight from here I would show every respect to that

new-made grave, though it was dug in reality months ago, as you know. Ishall write to her, and then as soon as she will consent to receive me I shall go. She will take me, I think, and forgive me that I loved another first, and that I cannot wholly forget Barbara,—even for her."

She did take him. The sorrow of which I have tried to write lies deep in the hearts of the Alleynes, never to be forgotten. It might be thought that the solemnity of such a woe would hold one's soul indifferent to the smaller pricks of fate; but I am not sure whether sometimes the lesser pang is not uppermost in Eleanor's bosom, when chance brings a reminder that after all it is Janie who is installed as mistress at Leigh Hall, and who is the happy mother of young Sir Richard Sudeleigh's heir.

SINCE Newman joined the Church of Rome there has probably been no figure in University life which has taken the public eye so much as that of the late Master of Balliol. In part this was naturally due to the place he filled as head of what he himself had no small share in making the most famous intellectual school in England; in part to the bold relief in which he stood out from the background of august nonentities as the typical representative of much that was best and worthiest in the old Oxford that was passing away around him. But it can hardly be doubted that most of his fame had its root in his own remarkable personality; and during the last two years his friends and pupils have not been backward in placing upon record their reminiscences of so uncommon and picturesque a figure. We know him as University reformer, as tutor and Master of his college, as philosopher, scholar, host, and wit; and it must be confessed that in each capacity he shines with no common brilliance.

Yet one or two reflections on this striking personality we propose to take the liberty of offering. In the first place one cannot help noticing that the most important portrait of all, that of Jowett as Master of his college, has in most instances been thrust completely into the background. And secondly, the very fact that the portraits are the work, as they almost invariably are, of close personal friends, makes it all but impossible to doubt that the enthusiasm which prompted them, as well as the prestige which attached to the Master in his

other capacities, have resulted in producing a figure which in several respects differs from the Jowett of the ordinary undergraduate's acquaintance. Be that as it may, there would certainly seem room for an effort to sketch, if it be only in the barest outline, such of the many sides of the late Master of Balliol's character as appeared most prominent to one of those undergraduates of the college who had not the good fortune to have been admitted to any of the various concentric circles of intimates, friends, and enthusiastic pupils, who practically composed his college acquaint

ance.

The ideal Head of a College has, one may suppose, still to be discovered. But we prophesy that, when he is found, there will be at least three great functions that he will regard as his primary duties. In the first place, apart from his routine work as Head of a Corporation of more or less importance, the supervision, that is to say, of its finance and management, apart too from his general oversight of the undergraduates' studies, he will make it part of his business to know at least something of all the men for whose general training he is responsible. Secondly, he will strive to utilise that knowledge in moulding and influencing for good the characters of the one or two hundred lads who are placed under his charge, and the great majority of whom are in a perfectly plastic state. And thirdly, he will endeavour to fulfil the same office to the college as a whole, seeking to make it not merely a great place of letters and learning, but a

force the influence of which, for truth and honour and righteousness, may be felt so far as possible in every grade of English society.

of

It may well have been that such conditions would not and did not all approve themselves to a man of Jowett's views. They would, of course, have been regarded as selfevident absurdities by those very great men to whom the Headship of a College meant a good house and a satisfactory income upon which to edit some forgotten classic, and who had about as much influence upon, or interest in, the successive generation young lives which passed through the college as the wall has upon the shadows that cross it. But if the points in question are to be regarded as in any sense standards of success or failure in such a position, in two of the three Jowett failed. Of course the failure was only comparative, and, by contrast with the historic Heads aforesaid, no failure at all. Presumably Jowett did not try to succeed in these directions; he felt that such success was for a man of so many parts almost impossible. haps the old traditions weighted him more than he himself or any one else was aware. At any rate the methods he adopted placed success in at least the two first directions out of the question. Of a certain number of undergraduates, the scholars, exhibitioners, and a few others, he saw a good deal; they often breakfasted with him, and, we heard, went through painful but bracing ordeals of essay reading and discussion over a glass of port during the Master's after-dinner hour. The principles on which the circle was made up were always more or less of a puzzle to us. It was said by the irreverent that if a man were a peer, a profligate, or a pauper the Master would be sure to take him up; and one sees now the reason that

Per

underlay such a method of selection; the physician applying himself to those that were sick. But as undergraduates, a good many men could not help resenting the rather odd. way in which one man was taken and another left; and they resented still more the extraordinary character of some of the personages who found their way into the college upon grounds that were certainly not connected with either intellect or industry, and who might hope, if they could be induced to do a little work, to look forward to the possible attainment of a third class. In all perhaps onethird of the college1 thus saw something of the Master in private life; the residue were only directly touched by his influence at three points; in chapel, at the brief interview in hall at the end of each term, known respectively to dons and undergraduates as Collections or Hand-shaking; and those still more unpleasant quarters of an hour when one was summoned before the Master for some offence whose enormity transcended the judicial powers of the Deans.

Doubtless of these three occasions the sermons were the most important; and Jowett's opportunities in the pulpit were no common ones. The college chapel unfortunately is small, none too large indeed for the members of the society, almost the whole of whom used, in the writer's time, to attend on the afternoons when the Master preached; while the visitors, who on such occasions found their way into Balliol in somewhat inconvenient numbers, had to make the best they could of an array of forms and benches disposed in any vacant spaces there might be in the aisle or chancel of the chapel. Frequently, of course, it proved

1 This and similar estimates must necessarily be based on little more than a rough impression, and therefore must not be implicitly relied upon.

impossible to find seats for every one. Surely no one who has been present at one of these Sunday afternoon services can ever forget the scene. The dark little chapel, densely crowded; the press of visitors along the aisle or close up to the very communion-table, so closely packed indeed that sometimes it was no easy matter for the Master to pick his way through to the pulpit; the stillness and silence, we may say the reverence of the massed rows of undergraduates; the faint light of the candles, with which the chapel was somewhat inadequately provided, gradually gaining in apparent strength as the daylight of the winter afternoon faded; the delicate silvery piping tones in which the sermon was delivered, frequently raised to a positive shrillness at the emphatic words of a telling passage, usually rising in pitch and emphasis at the close of a long sentence; the peculiar delivery, in detached jerky sentences, with glances over the chapel between each; the invariable or all but invariable interruption of the sermon towards its close by the harsh clang of the dinner-bell,all this makes a memory which is not easily effaced. Intellectually the sermons were to most men a deep pleasure; the perfection of their style, the daring little epigrams, the quaint and happy conceits embedded in them, added to the charm of manner peculiar to the preacher, could not and did not fail to fascinate his hearers. But for all that, one had to confess that perfect intellectual exercises as the sermons might be, there was little in them calculated to make a deep impression upon a young man. The great majority, at all events, always struck one as being ideal moral or biographical essays which might be delivered with much acceptance, as the Nonconformists say, to any highly educated audience anywhere; and one had at times to allow a sneaking preference for the

stronger meat of the evening preachers at one or other of the churches.

Jowett's personal intercourse with the ordinary undergraduate was confined, as has been remarked, practically to two occasions, the terminal Collections, and the judicial proceedings in his study. On each Saturday morning, it is true, there was a third meeting of a kind, when the weekly battells, that is to say, the account of the kitchen and buttery expenses for the week-were handed to us by the Master; but as in nineteen cases out of twenty no remark was made, we may leave this out from the list of interviews. To most of us, as we look back, the Master's attitude at Collections must be a subject for bewilderment and amazement to the end of our lives. So much, one feels, depended, so much might have come from that meeting, the Master's one chance, so to speak, when he and our tutors together reviewed or were supposed to review our progress during the term. A few, a very few, sensible sentences of approbation, or a few equally plain words of common sense might have made, would have made, such an enormous difference to us. The Master could speak, and upon occasion did speak, with a refreshing frankness which left nothing to be desired. But such an utterance was certainly the exception. In all ordinary instances something very different took place. One hung round the quadrangle or lounged on the forms at the lower end of the room in a state of more or less uneasiness, until one's name, in the shrill tones of the Master, resounded dismally loud in the empty hall. It was small wonder that we were uneasy, for it was by no means possible to predict what character the Master's comments would assume. They might, and they often did, take the form of crushing sarcasms. "The College, Mr. X., thinks highly of you, perhaps

too highly; but not half so highly, I am sure, as you think of yourself,” is a sample which the writer believes to have been true, and which if not true is no unfair specimen of what passed on some of these occasions. Such criticism was doubtless healthy but scarcely pleasant, as one sat in extreme discomfort on the edge of the chair in front of the Presence, a position both of body and mind not well suited to the appreciation of wit. More often still the Master's criticisms were represented by long flashes of painful silence as he stared at one sorrowfully over his glasses, while one's tutor at his side did his best to diminish the icy chill of this prolonged aphasia by a few words of kindly moderation; until the affair was closed by the Master suddenly whipping out some kind of an oracular saying, the precise bearing of which on the questions at issue was apt to pass the wit of undergraduate to discover. Sometimes, indeed, it may be questioned whether the point was discoverable by any one. And some of the comments certainly struck one as more suitable both in form and substance for delivery to a third-standard schoolboy than to an undergraduate. There were cases, and surely not a few cases, where the undergraduate, always in a considerable amount of anxiety about the Schools, simply hungered for a few strong and kind words which, to put it mildly, were not forthcoming. For example, was it particularly inspiring, at the end of a term of hard work ending in a first class in the college examination, to hear, after a lengthy survey of one's person, as if one was some rare animal : "Mr. A is an intelligent young man, is he not, Mr. Y?" Such an observation upon an occasion so solemn to the student could only strike one as supremely ridiculous. One may be permitted to doubt whether ridi

cule is the ideal issue of an interview with the Master of a college; one cannot doubt that it was a result which was frequently attained at Balliol. It is true, of course, that scores of smart sayings, purporting to have come into being at these interviews, have been fathered upon Jowett, though he was in no way responsible for their paternity. But in any case there was in the Master's attitude upon these occasions something that jarred very unpleasantly on one's ideas of what a Master should say and do. And apart from that there was a certain want of what we may term propriety in displays of satire on such occasions. Collections are certainly not an appropriate moment for these intellectual fireworks; and in addition one seriously doubts whether admonitions in this form ever made more than a transient impression upon their subject. For unhappily it was not merely at Collections that these peculiarities of manner and diction attached to the Master's utterHe did not seem, except in

ances.

extreme cases, to possess the faculty of saying a few plain words in a plain way to an offender. When anything was said, though it would be foolish to lay too much stress on a generalisation from the limited number of instances which were all that could come under an ordinary undergraduate's notice, it is useless to conceal the fact that too often it was the comic features of the interview which impressed themselves on the delinquent ; and what might have altered a career became simply another good story to retail to the college.

From what has been said it will be readily understood that to the average undergraduate, who had not the good fortune to have been admitted to the inner circle, and whose relations with the Master, save possibly for astray meal in the course of his four years,