I don’t think it odd that I should look careworn.  I have enough to make me so!  And yet if I were with you now, brightened up by being with you, you would say, “How well he looks!” And you would think I had any amount of work in me, as you saw me riding or walking or holding services.  And then I had to a very considerable extent got over that silly shyness, which was a great trial and drawback to me of old, and sadly prevented me from enjoying the society of people (at Oxford especially) which would have done me much good.  But without all these bodily defects, I should have been even more vain, and so I can see the blessing and mercy now, though how many times I have indulged murmuring rebellious thoughts!

’Perhaps I shall live ten or twenty years, and look back and say, “I recollect how in ’64 I really almost thought I should not last long.”  But don’t fancy that I am morbidly cherishing such fancies.  Only I like you all to know me as I am changing in feeling from time to time.  There is quite enough to account for it all.’

A few days later he returned to Auckland, and thence wrote to me a letter on the pros and cons of a move from New Zealand.  The sight of ships and the town he had ceased to think of great importance, and older scholars had ceased to care for it, and there was much at that time to recommend Curtis Island to his mind.  The want of bread-fruit was the chief disadvantage he then saw in it, but he still looked to keeping up Kohimarama for a good many years to come.  I cannot describe how tender and considerate he was of feelings he thought I might possibly have of disappointment that St. Andrew’s was not a successful experiment as far as health was concerned, evidently fearing that I had set my hopes on that individual venture, and that my feelings might be hurt if it had to be deserted.

The next letters are a good deal occupied with the troubles incident to the judgment upon ‘Essays and Reviews.’  He took a view, as has been seen, such as might be expected of the delicate refining metaphysical mind, thinking out points for itself, and weighing the possible value of every word, and differed from those who were in the midst of the contest, and felt some form of resistance and protest needful.  He was strongly averse to agitation on the subject, and at the same time grieved to find himself for the first time, to his own knowledge, not accepting the policy of those whom he so much respected; though the only difference in his mind from theirs was as to the manner of the maintenance of the truth, and the immediate danger of error going uncondemned—­a point on which his remote life perhaps hardly enabled him to judge.