not really a prig himself, he got the credit of being the cause of priggishness in others, though perhaps he was only to blame in not warning them off a very obvious and well-marked shoal. He did his best, we honestly believe, to clear his mind of cant, and we can inagine him secretly writhing at the loudmouthed dictum of some egregious "social reformer," that "what Balliol thinks to-day, England thinks to-morrow!" He could certainly play the candid friend to some purpose, and there were several points on which he refused to subscribe to the orthodox Lib. eral confession. He was not ashamed to put in a good word for our old ally Napoleon III., and his sympathies were all with France in her struggle with Germany. He never took kindly to the movement for the higher education of women, and greatly feared that in the future there might be "a neglect of accomplishments, especially music and drawing, which I shall always consider a very important element of female, and, perhaps, of all education" (ii. 291). He nourished no great enthusiasm for "oppressed nationalities," and was a hearty Turcophil during the RussoTurkish war. He had a liking for Lord Beaconsfield, but always distrusted Mr. Gladstone, in whom, it is true, the Oxford Liberals, suspecting his clerical proclivities, reposed but little confidence. Much more to his taste were the pre-reform statesmen, whom he considered to have been more loyal and faithful to one another than the politicians of to-day (ii. 395). He was astoundingly ignorant of science. He rightly held it "impossible to convert Shelley into a decent and honorable man" (ii. 318). In a letter written in 1846 he expresses views as to the English aristocracy which Gifford or Croker, though they would have cheerfully indorsed them, would have thought twice before printing (i. 151). Above all, he was a thorough-going "Jingo." He complained that the Liberals in 1878 were becoming bitter and "un-English," and he would have repudiated with scorn Sam Rogers's complacent and uisgraceful boast that he

"had never wished well to his Majesty's armies."

These are notable divergences from the beaten track of Liberalism, and must have cost a considerable effort. But in other respects his independence of mind broke down, and he was content to go on mumbling the hallowed formulæ. He seemed to find a peculiar charm-and many others have done the same-in the very name of "Liberal." "I used to think myself a Liberal," he writes in 1882, "but sometimes fear that I am in danger of becoming a Tory, though I struggle against this as much as I can" (ii. 210). He seems to have felt himself "thirled" to the thing called Liberalism, and bound consequently to oppose and thwart its foes. How else could he have persuaded himself that the author of the "Vie de Jésus" and "L'Abbesse de Jouarre❞ was "a really great and good man"? For what other reason could he have invited Colenso to occupy the pulpit of Balliol chapel-Colenso with whose methods he had little in common? We readily acquit him of the deliberate desire or intention to wound the deepest feelings of those who still asked for the old paths. Yet he was by no means disinclined to irritate them, almost mischievously, in lesser matters. "I rather like," he writes in 1893, "when preaching in Westminster Abbey, to take the liberty of saying a word in favor of some great dissenter or saintly infidel, whose praise is not heard in all the churches" (ii. 470); and he would maintain that Voltaire had done more good than all the fathers of the Church put together! The spirit of such utterances is the key to many little problems in the master's conduct. It helps to explain the Sunday evening concerts; it entirely explains that memorable Sunday afternoon concert in the garden quad., when a military band discoursed quasi-sacred music to a disorderly mob of ruffians from the town who took the college by storm. The biographers say nothing of the incident; and the experiment was not repeated. The same feeling also supplies a clue to some of his public appearances which

could well have been spared. In spite of his evangelical upbringing he had no real liking for dissent; but when the dissenters opened a seminary of their own in the town, dislike of the High Church party moved him to give his benediction to the venture. Nor can we doubt that he was animated mainly by similar "contrariness" when he instigated the singularly impudent attempt to elect a virulent dissenter one of the examiners in the Rudiments of faith and religion.

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vanity of ideals realized and aspirations gratified.

Another way in which the master's strain of Liberalism displayed itself was his preference for being on the winning side, and his nervous solicitude to have a finger in every scheme that held out a fair prospect of success. He loved to be dans le mouvement, and would have hated it to be supposed that he had banned anything which ultimately turned out to be popular. Thus he relaxed somewhat of his open hostility to the "higher education" of women, when he found the movement gathering strength. So, too, when the Toynbee Hall project was mooted, though his soul must have revolted at the deluge of nonsense which then swept over the college, he appeared at a meeting in hall and bestowed a few words of chilly approbation on the scheme. He was from the first a supporter of the preposterous "University Extension" movement, perhaps the most laughable of the many farces which have been played on the Oxford stage. It has, no doubt, the merit of providing many excellent young gentlemen of moderate abilities with a "living wage;" but there can have been little really to appeal to the common sense of Mr. Jowett either in its solemn affectation of seriousness, its impudent demands upon the public purse, or its month of picnicking at Oxford in the long vacation. It may be conjectured, indeed, that many developments of university "reform" which he lived to see, and against which he never opened his lips, were secretly distasteful to him. And he, too, like the other Oxford Liberals whom we have mentioned, was to taste the bitterness of fruition, and the

There is greater discontent [he remarks with astonishing and relentless cruelty] in Oxford now than formerly. The younger men want to marry, and they have no money. They want to write, and have no originality. They want to be scholars, and have no industry. They want to be fine gentlemen, and are deficient in manners. When they have families they will be at their wits' end how to provide for them. Many of them have the fretfulness of parvenus, and will always have this unfortunate temper of mind.

Had Burgon possessed either the heart or the head to formulate so pointed an indictment against the outcome of fifty years' agitation, what a howl of execration would have arisen against the ferocious bigot!

It was, however, far more in connection with the college than the university that Mr. Jowett's best work was performed. It was the college that most occupied his thoughts, the college that lay closest to his heart. During the whole period of his mastership his will there was law, and even during the latter part of Scott's reign he swayed its destinies. No human being could have ruled such an institution for so long a time without committing some errors, and there were, unquestionably, details in his management to which exception might be taken. Perhaps he permitted the college to grow too large, but we doubt if he could have kept it small. Perhaps he was too prone to encourage the residence of Parthians, Medes, Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia, and members of tribes even more remote. Yet we doubt if they did anybody any harm, though we are quite sure that any of their number who happened to be professing Christians from the Levant would have done so if they could. With much more force it may be urged that the introduction of the organ into the hall, with all its consequences, was a grave mistake. We should be disposed to concede that the master's better judgment deserted him

in that matter, and to wonder how any one of his experience could bring himself to believe that second-rate music on Sunday evenings and occasional smoking concerts during the week could effectually cement the incongruous elements of which a college like Balliol is necessarily composed. Due allowance, however, being made for such failings, no competent judge will seriously dispute that, take it all in all, Mr. Jowett was a first-rate Head of his House. Mr. Abbott tells a pleasant story of how Doctor Harper of Jesus, when walking with Jowett and on coming first to a small gate, stopped suddenly, and, holding it open, said, "No, you go first; you have done more for your college than I have." It was a fine compliment, and one which did honor not only to the recipient but to him who paid it.

It is often said that Mr. Jowett was a worshipper of success; that he had favorites; and that those favorites by a curious coincidence were also the favorites of fortune, the well-born and the prosperous. That he did attach great importance to birth is quite true, and that he attached perhaps an exaggerated importance to the gifts which ensure popularity in good society is true also. "I dare say," he writes to a lady in India, "that you have already found a great solvent of political difficulties is to give friendly and agreeable dinnerparties to all sorts of people without re gard to their views” (ii. 285). It is generally shy people who put the highest value upon the art of pleasing in company. It is, further, perfectly true that Mr. Jowett had, as he himself puts it, “a general prejudice against all persons who do not succeed in the world," and we shall never forget the very neat hit in a sermon at those "who say 'the race is not to the swift,' meaning themselves." It is probably a sufficient apology for a tendency to which he was thoroughly alive himself to remember the sort of man his father was. With such a conspicuous instance of fumbling and failure before his eyes, is it to be wondered at that he shrunk from the spectacle of opportunities neglected

and talent frittered away? After all, in nine cases out of ten the world is rightly content to apply the rough-andready test of success to a man's capacity; and with the great bulk of those who passed under his observation Mr. Jowett made no mistake, but, on the contrary, formed an extraordinarily accurate idea of the idiosyncrasy of each. He knew whom to stimulate with a word of encouragement, and whom to spur with a word of reproach. Yet, in the exceptional case, his method broke down; and we can recall more than one instance of some rare character, too finely tempered for the rough work of the world, which the master seemed persistently to misunderstand and which he never did justice.

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To scholarship in the strict sense of the term Mr. Jowett had no serious pretensions. Philosophy rather was supposed to be his strong point. It is a little difficult, after an impartial consideration of his published writings, to understand why. During the last ten years of his life, at all events, he had very little of the philosopher about him. The essayist who visited him at dessert would get a glass of excellent claret and some sound literary advice, such as "Never make a 'porch' to your essay," if he had opened with a long and irrelevant exordium. Or perhaps he would be pulled up for some piece of pedantry by the sharp inquiry: "Interrogate your consciousness! Do you mean, ‘Ask yourself"?" But he had no taste for following out the course of an argument, and though he clung tenaciously to the stereotyped views formed thirty or forty years before with no perceptible variation, he seemed to have no recollection of the chain of reasoning by which he had reached them, far less any desire to test or examine them afresh. He frigidly and firmly dis

1 It used to be part of the mythology that the brilliant scholar whose help he invoked in revising the first division of the "Plato" would sit smoking and working in one room, and from time to time exclaim, "Another howler, Master!" To which the answer would come in a piping voice from the adjoining apartment, "Correct it, Mr. ! Correct it!"

couraged all discussion on the origin and explanation of evil, for example, and he held the dilemma in abhorrence. The latter savored of logic, which was a "dodge;” the former of metaphysics, the popular view of which he avowedly shared.

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His writings present the same char acteristics. They abound in close and pregnant observation of human nature, and in searching analysis of many familiar philosophical and theological phrases. But take him on some question, such as predestination and freewill, and you find that he supplies nothing more than a graceful and elegant amplification of several obvious and elementary propositions. "Man is creature of habit-man is a creature of impulse-man is a creature of circumstances. Que voulez-vous?" he seems to ask. The de quo quæritur being precisely the relation of those truths one another, and the possibility of their reconciliation, it is neither satisfactory nor stimulating to be told that they need no reconciliation at all, that everything is plain sailing, and that the difficulty of believing at once in an omnipotent and omniscient Deity and in man as a morally free agent is a silly invention of over-subtle divines. This ostrich-like attitude towards the primary difficulties which beset the threshold of every religious system he was most resolute in maintaining. The most flagrant contradictions are explained away by a jaunty reference to the "modes of thought" of a particular age and country, while the explicit statements of a divinely inspired writer are cavalierly brushed aside or reduced to vagueness by the convenient sumption that the author spoke "in a figure."

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The more Mr. Jowett's attitude towards religion is examined the more amazing will it seem. He was well enough aware that in his commentary on the Pauline Epistles, and later on in "Essays and Reviews," he was about to deliver an attack on the orthodox position. This is plain from his anxiety to pick his words, and to present his views in the "least repulsive manner."

To the very end he systematically inculcated a degree of "reserve in communicating religious knowledge" (from his own point of view) which would have struck poor Mr. Isaac Williams with horror. Yet he seems to have been genuinely surprised and hurt when the pleasant but thin disguise of language was instantly penetrated; when his adroit use of current religious phraseology and his unrivalled dexterity in adapting the words of Scripture to suit his own construction were proved to have availed him nothing; and when the true drift of his argument was mercilessly exposed. The truth is, that while from one point of view the premisses of the "Essay on the Interpretation of Scripture" are musty truisms, from another they are sufficient to explode not merely the orthodox conception of Christianity, but also the shapeless and indefinite residuum to which Jowett so piously adhered. As time went on, his scepticism grew bolder and more outspoken. He threw miracles overboard altogether, and it is not easy to say which, if any, of the cardinal doctrines of the faith he retained. Yet on the subject of prayer, for instance, he was as hopelessly irrational (on his own hypothesis) as the most superstitious of his fellow-creatures. He makes, indeed, the proviso that no one should pray for anything that may violate the "laws of nature," for with all his dislike of metaphysics he was an abject slave to that most tyrannous and exacting of metaphysical abstractions. None the less he exhorts a friend on his death-bed to pray that he may be spared a little longer; as though his recovery were not, on Jowett's postulates, as much a matter of "law" as the rising of the sun or the precession of the equinoxes. His aim was "to place religion on a rational basis." His method of procedure is to eliminate the vital constituents of religion, and then to find a justification for preserving its lifeless remains, to which it turns out that "reason" is absolutely repugnant. Such solicitude for the shadow when the substance has been destroyed may be very touching and pathetic; but one