considerate opponent.  Strong words he used, and used deliberately.  But those were the days when the weapons of sarcasm and personal attack were freely handled.  The leaders of the High Church movement were held up to detestation as the Oxford Malignants, and they certainly showed themselves fully able to give their assailants as good as they brought; yet Mr. Keble, involved in more than one trying personal controversy, feeling as sternly and keenly as any one about public questions, and tried by disappointment and the break up of the strongest ties, never lost his evenness of temper, never appeared in the arena of personal recrimination.  In all the prominent part which he took, and in the resolute and sometimes wrathful tone in which he defended what seemed harsh measures, he may have dropped words which to opponents seemed severe ones, but never any which even they could call a scornful one or a sneer.

It was in keeping with all that he was—­a mark of imperfection it may be, yet part of the nobleness and love of reality in a man who felt so deeply the weakness and ignorance of man—­that he cared so little about the appearances of consistency.  Thus, bound as he was by principle to show condemnation when he thought that a sacred cause was invaded, he was always inclining to conciliate his wrath with his affectionateness, and his severity with his consideration of circumstances and his own mistrust of himself.  He was, of all men holding strong opinions, one of the most curiously and unexpectedly tolerant, wherever he could contrive to invent an excuse for tolerance, or where long habitual confidence was weighed against disturbing appearances.  Sir John Coleridge touches this in the following extract, which is characteristic:—­

On questions of this kind especially [University Reform], his principles were uncompromising; if a measure offended against what he thought honest, or violated what he thought sacred, good motives in the framers he would not admit as palliation, nor would he be comforted by an opinion of mine that measures mischievous in their logical consequences were never in the result so mischievous, or beneficial measures so beneficial, as had been foretold.  So he writes playfully to me at an earlier time:—­

“Hurrell Froude and I took into consideration your opinion that ‘there are good men of all parties,’ and agreed that it is a bad doctrine for these days; the time being come in which, according to John Miller, ’scoundrels must be called scoundrels’; and, moreover, we have stigmatised the said opinion by the name of the Coleridge Heresy.  So hold it any longer at your peril.”

I think it fair to set down these which were, in truth, formed opinions, and not random sayings; but it would be most unfair if one concluded from them, written and spoken in the freedom of friendly intercourse, that there was anything sour in his spirit, or harsh and narrow in his practice; when you discussed