great.  They were always written in beautifully clear and fluent English, and were often decorated with a fine quotation in prose or verse.  In substance they were extraordinarily simple, though not childish.  For example, he often preached on such practical topics as Gambling, National Education; and the Housing of the Poor, as well as on themes more obviously and directly religious.  He was at his best in commemorating a boy who had died in the School, when his genuine sympathy with sorrow made itself unmistakably felt.  But whatever was the subject, whether public or domestic, he always treated it in the same simply Christian spirit.  I know from his own lips that he had never passed through those depths of spiritual experience which go to make a great preacher; but his sermons revealed in every sentence a pure, chivalrous, and duty-loving heart.  One of his intimate friends once spoke of his “Arthur-like” character, and the epithet was exactly right.

His most conspicuous gift was unquestionably his eloquence.  His fluency, beauty of phrase, and happy power of turning “from grave to gay, from lively to severe,” made him extraordinarily effective on a platform or at a social gathering.  Once (in the autumn of 1870) he injured his right arm, and so was prevented from writing his sermons.  For three or four Sundays he preached extempore, and even boys who did not usually care for sermons were fascinated by his oratory.

In the region of thought I doubt if he exercised any great influence.  To me he never seemed to have arrived at his conclusions by any process of serious reasoning.  He held strongly and conscientiously a certain number of conventions—­a kind of Palmerstonian Whiggery, a love of “spirited foreign policy;” an admiration for the military character, an immense regard for the Crown, for Parliament, and for all established institutions (he was much shocked when the present Bishop of Oxford spoke in the Debating Society in favour of Republicanism); and in every department of life he paid an almost superstitious reverence to authority.  I once ventured to tell him that even a beadle was a sacred being in his eyes, and he did not deny the soft impeachment.

His intellectual influence was not in the region of thought, but in that of expression.  His scholarship was essentially literary.  He had an instinctive and unaffected love of all that was beautiful, whether in prose or verse, in Greek, Latin, or English.  His reading was wide and thorough.  Nobody knew Burke so well, and he had a contagious enthusiasm for Parliamentary oratory.  In composition he had a curiosa felicitas in the strictest meaning of the phrase; for his felicity was the product of care.  To go through a prize-exercise with him was a real joy, so generous was his appreciation, so fastidious his taste, so dexterous his substitution of the telling for the ineffective word, and so palpably genuine his enjoyment of the business.