own shy pride in him--from a great distance. For I was a self-conscious,
bookish child, and my days of real friendship with him were still far
ahead. But during the years that followed, the ten years that he held
his professorship, what a spell he wielded over Oxford, and literary
England in general! Looking back, one sees how the first series of
_Essays in Criticism_, the _Lectures on Celtic Literature_, or _On
Translating Homer, Culture, and Anarchy_ and the rest, were all the time
working on English taste and feeling, whether through sympathy or
antagonism; so that after those ten years, 1857-1867, the intellectual
life of the country had absorbed, for good and all, an influence, and a
stimulus, which had set it moving on new paths to new ends. With these
thoughts in mind, supplying a comment on the letter which few people
could have foreseen in 1857, let me quote a few more sentences:

Keble voted for me after all. He told the Coleridges he was so much
pleased with my letter (to the electors) that he could not refrain.
... I had support from all sides. Archdeacon Denison voted for me,
also Sir John Yarde Buller, and Henley, of the high Tory party. It
was an immense victory--some 200 more voted than have ever, it is
said, voted in a Professorship election before. It is a great
lesson to Christ Church, which was rather disposed to imagine it
could carry everything by its great numbers.

Good-by, my dearest mother.... I have just been up to see the three
dear little brown heads on their pillows, all asleep.... My
affectionate thanks to Mrs. Wordsworth and Mrs. Fletcher for
their kind interest in my success.

It is pleasant to think of Wordsworth's widow, in her "old age serene
and bright," and of the poet's old friend, Mrs. Fletcher, watching and