It was through my beloved Lady Wemyss that I first met the Master of Balliol.  One evening in 1888, after the men had come in from shooting, we were having tea in the large marble hall at Gosford. [Footnote:  Gosford is the Earl of Wemyss’ country place and is situated between Edinburgh and North Berwick.] I generally wore an accordion skirt at tea, as Lord Wemyss liked me to dance to him.  Some one was playing the piano and I was improvising in and out of the chairs, when, in the act of making a final curtsey, I caught my foot in my skirt and fell at the feet of an old clergyman seated in the window.  As I got up, a loud “Damn!” resounded through the room.  Recovering my presence of mind, I said, looking up: 

“You are a clergyman and I am afraid I have shocked you!”

“Not at all,” he replied.  “I hope you will go on; I like your dancing extremely.”

I provoked much amusement by asking the family afterwards if the parson whose presence I had failed to notice was their minister at Aberlady.  I then learnt that he was the famous Dr. Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol.

Before telling how my friendship with the Master developed, I shall go back to the events in Oxford which gave him his insight into human beings and caused him much quiet suffering.

In 1852 the death of Dr. Jenkyns caused the Mastership at Balliol to become vacant.  Jowett’s fame as a tutor was great, but with it there had spread a suspicion of “rationalism.”  Persons whispered that the great tutor was tainted with German views.  This reacted unduly upon his colleagues; and, when the election came, he was rejected by a single vote.  His disappointment was deep, but he threw himself more than ever into his work.  He told me that a favourite passage of his in Marcus Aurelius—­“Be always doing something serviceable to mankind and let this constant generosity be your only pleasure, not forgetting a due regard to God”—­had been of great help to him at that time.

The lectures which his pupils cared most about were those on Plato and St. Paul; both as tutor and examiner he may be said to have stimulated the study of Plato in Oxford:  he made it a rival to that of Aristotle.

“Aristotle is dead,” he would say, “but Plato is alive.”

Hitherto he had published little—­an anonymous essay on Pascal and a few literary articles—­but under the stimulus of disappointment he finished his share of the edition of St. Paul’s Epistles, which had been undertaken in conjunction with Arthur Stanley.  Both produced their books in 1855; but while Stanley’s Corinthians evoked languid interest, Jowett’s Galatians, Thessalonians and Romans provoked a clamour among his friends and enemies.  About that time he was appointed to the Oxford Greek Chair, which pleased him much; but his delight was rather dashed by a hostile article in the Quarterly Review, abusing him and his religious writings.  The Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Cotton, required from him a fresh signature of the Articles of the Church of England.  At the interview, when addressed by two men—­one pompously explaining that it was a necessary act if he was to retain his cloth and the other apologising for inflicting a humiliation upon him—­he merely said: