His ways and his talk were such as to call forth not unfrequent mirth among those who most revered him.  He would meet you and look you in the face without speaking a word.  He was not without humour; but his jokes, carried off by a little laugh of his own, were apt to be recondite in their meaning and allusions.  With his great power of sympathy, he yet did not easily divine other men’s lighter or subtler moods, and odd and sometimes even distressing mistakes were the consequence.  His health was weak, and a chronic tenderness of throat and chest made him take precautions which sometimes seemed whimsical; and his well-known figure in a black cloak, with a black veil over his college cap, and a black comforter round his neck, which at one time in Oxford acquired his name, sometimes startled little boys and sleepy college porters when he came on them suddenly at night.

With more power than most men of standing alone, and of arranging his observations on life and the world in ways of his own, he had pre-eminently above all men round him, in the highest and noblest form, the spirit of a disciple.  Like most human things, discipleship has its good and its evil, its strong and its poor and dangerous side; but it really has, what is much forgotten now, a good and a strong side.  Both in philosophy and religion, the [Greek:  mathaetaes] is a distinct character, and Charles Marriott was an example of it at its best.  He had its manly and reasonable humility, its generous trustfulness, its self-forgetfulness; he had, too, the enthusiasm of having and recognising a great master and teacher, and doing what he wanted done; and he learned from the love of his master to love what he believed truth still more.  The character of the disciple does not save a man from difficulties, from trouble and perplexity; but it tends to save him from idols of his own making.  It is something, in the trials of life and faith, to have the consciousness of knowing or having known some one greater and better and wiser than oneself, of having felt the spell of his guidance and example.  Marriott’s mind, quick to see what was real and strong, and at once reverent to it as soon as he saw it, came very much, as an undergraduate at Balliol, under the influence of a very able and brilliant tutor, Moberly, afterwards Headmaster of Winchester and Bishop of Salisbury; and to the last his deference and affection to his old tutor remained unimpaired.  But he came under a still more potent charm when he moved to Oriel, and became the friend of Mr. Newman.  Master and disciple were as unlike as any two men could be; they were united by their sympathy in the great crisis round them, by their absorbing devotion to the cause of true religion.  Marriott brought to the movement, and especially to its chief, a great University character, and an unswerving and touching fidelity.  He placed himself, his life, and all that he could do, at the service of the great effort to elevate and animate the Church;