As regards the diplomatic life, it seems certain that he would have enjoyed it thoroughly, and one would think that he was exactly the man to conduct a delicate negotiation with tact, good humour, and good sense.  Some glimmering of these gifts seems to have dawned from time to time on the unimaginative minds of his official chiefs; for three times he was sent by the Education Office on Foreign Missions, half diplomatic in their character, to enquire into the condition and methods of Public Instruction on the Continent.  The ever-increasing popularity which attended him on these Missions, and his excellent judgment in handling Foreign Ministers and officials, might perhaps suggest the thought that in renouncing diplomacy he renounced his true vocation.  But the thought, though natural, is superficial, and must give way to the absolute conviction that he never could have known true happiness—­never realized his own ideal of life—­without a wife, a family, and a home.  And these are luxuries which, as a rule, diplomatists cannot attain till

    youth and bloom and this delightful world

have lost something of their freshness.  In renouncing diplomacy he secured, before he was twenty-nine, the chief boon of human life; but a vague desire to enjoy that boon amid continental surroundings seems constantly to have visited him.  In 1851 he wrote to his wife:  “We can always look forward to retiring to Italy on L200 a year.”  In 1853 he wrote to her again:  “All this afternoon I have been haunted by a vision of living with you at Berne, on a diplomatic appointment, and how different that would be from this incessant grind in schools.”  And, thirty years later, when he was approaching the end of his official life, he wrote a friend:  “I must go once more to America to see my daughter, who is going to be married to an American, settled in her new home.  Then I ‘feel like’ retiring to Florence, and rarely moving from it again.”

But, in spite of all these dreams and longings, he seems to have known that his lot was cast in England, and that England must be the sphere of his main activities.  “Year slips away after year, and one begins to find that the Office has really had the main part of one’s life, and that little remains.”

We, who are his disciples, habitually think of him as a poet, or a critic, or an instructor in national righteousness and intelligence; as a model of private virtue and of public spirit.  We do not habitually think of him as, in the narrow and technical sense, an Educator.  And yet a man who gives his life to a profession must be in a great measure judged by what he accomplished in and through that profession, even though in the first instance he “adopted it in order to marry.”

Though not a born educator, not an educator by natural aptitude or inclination, he made himself an educator by choice; and, having once chosen his profession, he gradually developed an interest in it, a pride in it, a love of it which astonished some of his friends.  How irksome it was to him at the beginning we saw just now in his address to the Teachers.  How irksome in many of its incidents it remained we can see in his published Letters.