This is the tribute of one friend; let me add my own.  I do not presume to say what I think about him as a spiritual guide and example; I confine myself to humbler topics.  Whatever else he is, Henry Scott Holland is, beyond doubt, one of the most delightful people in the world.  In fun and geniality and warm-hearted, hospitality, he is a worthy successor of Sydney Smith, whose official house he inhabits; and to those elements of agreeableness he adds certain others which his famous predecessor could scarcely have claimed.  He has all the sensitiveness of genius, with its sympathy, its versatility, its unexpected turns, its rapid transitions from grave to gay, its vivid appreciation of all that is beautiful in art and nature, literature and life.  No man in London, I should think, has so many and such devoted friends in every class and station; and those friends acknowledge in him not only the most vivacious and exhilarating of social companions, but one of the moral forces which have done most to quicken their consciences and lift their lives.

* * * * *

By the death of Henry Scott Holland a great light is quenched,[*] or, to use more Christian language, is merged in “the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”

[Footnote *:  Written in 1918.]

Light is the idea with which my beloved friend is inseparably associated in my mind.  His nature had all the attributes of light—­its revealing power, its cheerfulness, its salubrity, its beauty, its inconceivable rapidity.  He had the quickest intellect that I have ever known.  He saw with a flash into the heart of an argument or a situation.  He diffused joy by his own joy in living; he vanquished morbidity by his essential wholesomeness; whatever he touched became beautiful under his handling.  “He was not the Light, but he came to bear witness of that Light,” and bore it for seventy years by the mere force of being what he was.  My friendship with Dr. Holland began in my second term at Oxford, and has lasted without a cloud or a break from that day to this.  He was then twenty-five years old, and was already a conspicuous figure in the life of the University.  In 1866 he had come up from Eton to Balliol with a high reputation for goodness and charm, but with no report of special cleverness.  He soon became extremely popular in his own College and outside it.  He rowed and played games and sang, and was recognized as a delightful companion wherever he went.  But all the time a process of mental development was going on, of which none but his intimate friends were aware.  “I owed nothing to Jowett,” he was accustomed to say; “everything to Green.”  From that great teacher he caught his Hegelian habit of thought, his strong sense of ethical and spiritual values, and that practical habit of mind which seeks to apply moral principles to the problems of actual life.  In 1870 came the great surprise, and Holland, who had no pretensions to scholarship, and whose mental development had only been noticed by a few, got a First Class of unusual brilliancy in the searching school of Literoe Humaniores.  Green had triumphed; he had made a philosopher without spoiling a Christian.  Christ Church welcomed a born Platonist, and made him Senior Student, Tutor, and Lecturer.