learning, under what name soever it come forth or to what
immediate end soever it be directed, the final end is to lead
and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls,
made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of.

Indeed, just to listen to him was a purifying of wit, an enriching
of memory, an enabling of judgment, an enlarging of imagination. He
gave us "so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any man to
enter into it."

He moved among all human contacts with unerring grace. He was never
the teacher, always the comrade. It was his way to pretend that we
knew far more than we did; so with perfect courtesy and gravity, he
would ask our opinion on some matter of which we knew next to
nothing; and we knew it was only his exquisiteness of good manners
that impelled the habit; and we knew he knew the laughableness of
it; yet we adored him for it. He always suited his strength to our
weakness; would tell us things almost with an air of apology for
seeming to know more than we; pretending that we doubtless had known
it all along, but it had just slipped our memory. Marvellously he
set us on our secret honour to do justice to this rare courtesy. To
fail him in some task he had set became, in our boyish minds, the
one thing most abhorrent in dealing with such a man--a discourtesy.
He was a man of the rarest and most delicate breeding, the finest
and truest gentleman we had known. Had he been nothing else, how
much we would have learnt from that alone.

What a range, what a grasp, there was in his glowing, various mind!
How open it was on all sides, how it teemed with interests, how
different from the scholar of silly traditional belief! We used to