completeness of his scheme for organizing National Education, that the Universities and the Public Schools, as well as the Private and the Elementary Schools, should be criticised; but, in dealing with the former, his criticism is far less drastic and insistent than with the latter.  The reason of the difference probably is that, though an Inspector, a Professor, and a critic, he was frankly human, and shrank from laying his hand too roughly on institutions to which he himself had owed so much.

His feeling for Oxford every one knows.  The apostrophe to the “Adorable Dreamer” is familiar to hundreds who could not, for their life, repeat another line of his prose or verse.  It was “the place he liked best in the world.”  When he climbed the hill at Hinksey and looked down on Oxford, he “could not describe the effect which this landscape always has upon me—­the hillside, with its valleys, and Oxford in the great Thames Valley below.”

Of the spiritual effect of the place upon hearts nurtured there, he said:  “We in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one truth—­the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human perfection.  When I insist on this, I am all in the faith and tradition of Oxford.”

Of the Honorary Degree conferred on him by Oxford, he said:  “Nothing could more gratify me, I think, than this recognition by my own University, of which I am so fond, and where, according to their own established standard of distinction, I did so little.”  And, after the Encaenia at which the degree was actually given, he wrote:  “I felt sure I should be well received, because there is so much of an Oxford character about what I have written, and the undergraduates are the last people to bear one a grudge for having occasionally chaffed them.”

And here let me insert the moving passage in which, speaking in his last years to an American audience, he did honour to the spiritual master of his undergraduate days.  “Forty years ago Cardinal Newman was in the very prime of life; he was close at hand to us at Oxford; he was preaching in St. Mary’s pulpit every Sunday; he seemed about to transform and to renew what was for us the most national and natural institution in the world, the Church of England.  Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary’s, rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music—­subtle, sweet, mournful?  I seem to hear him still....  Or, if we followed him back to his seclusion at Littlemore, that dreary village by the London road, and to the house of retreat and the church which he built there—­a mean house such as Paul might have lived in when he was tent-making at Ephesus, a church plain and thinly sown with worshippers—­who could resist him there either, welcoming back to the severe joys of Church-fellowship, and of daily worship and prayer, the firstlings of a generation which had well-nigh forgotten them?”