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