freshmen, bores of every kind, broken-down tradesmen, old women, distressed foreigners, converted Jews, all the odd and helpless wanderers from beaten ways, were to be heard of at Marriott’s rooms; and all, more or less, had a share of his time and thoughts, and perhaps counsel.  He was sensible of worry as he grew older; but he never relaxed his efforts to do what any one asked of him.  There must be even now some still living who know what no one else knows, how much they owe, with no direct claim on him, to Charles Marriott’s inexhaustible patience and charity.  The pains which he would take with even the most uncongenial and unpromising men, who somehow had come in his way, and seemed thrown on his charge, the patience with which he would bear and condone their follies and even worse, were not to be told, for, indeed, few knew what they were.

“He was always ready to be the friend of any one whose conduct gave proofs of high principle, however inferior to himself in knowledge or acquirements, and his friendship once gained was not easily lost.  I believe there was nothing in his power which he was not ready to do for a friend who wanted his help.  It is not easy to state instances of such kindness without revealing what for many reasons had better be left untold.  But many such have come to my knowledge, and I believe there are many more known only to himself and to those who derived benefit from his disinterested friendship."[35]

Marriott’s great contribution to the movement was his solid, simple goodness, his immovable hope, his confidence that things would come right.  With much imaginativeness open to poetical grandeur and charm, and not without some power of giving expression to feeling, he was destitute of all that made so many others of his friends interesting as men.  He was nothing, as a person to know and observe, to the genius of the two Mozleys, to the brilliant social charm of Frederic Faber, to the keen, refined intelligence of Mark Pattison, to the originality and clever eccentricity of William Palmer of Magdalen.  And he was nothing as a man of practical power for organising and carrying out successful schemes:  such power was not much found at Oxford in those days.  But his faith in his cause, as the cause of goodness and truth, was proof against mockery or suspicion or disaster.  When ominous signs disturbed other people he saw none.  He had an almost perverse subtlety of mind which put a favourable interpretation on what seemed most formidable.  As his master drew more and more out of sympathy with the English Church, Marriott, resolutely loyal to it and to him, refused to understand hints and indications which to others were but too plain.  He vexed and even provoked Newman, in the last agonies of the struggle, by the optimism with which he clung to useless theories and impossible hopes.  For that unquenchable hoping against hope, and hope unabated still when the catastrophe had come, the English Church at least owes him deep gratitude.  Throughout those anxious years he never despaired of her.