the interest. I shall think about the undergraduates day and night (though I cannot say this to most people): I believe that this is the way to succeed. At the same time it is one of the advantages of the place that I have not so much drudgery as I used to have. To DR. GREENHILL. OXFORD, October 2, 1870. kind con I have been long intending to answer your gratulations. I hope that you will not take the delay as a measure of my feelings about them. Thank you many times. There is no place that I would sooner have than that which I hold. Some of my friends seem to entertain rather exaggerated expectations of what I can do, but I shall try to do something. Will you come and see me when you come to Oxford? I should like your boy to understand that he is welcome to come and see me whenever he likes; I will do what I can for him. E. HARRISON TO BALLIOL, November 26, 1870. A 'perpendicular' at the Master's last night. Among others Dean Stanley, gorgeous as to the neck with the ribband of some order', flowing with historical and ecclesiastical anecdote; Lady Augusta, playing with a fan, universally chatty; Père Hyacinthe, short, big-nosed, talking French to whoso could talk French to him; and dear old Jowler, simple, hospitable, and genial; handsomer too than anybody in the room, man or woman. TO LADY STANLEY OF ALDERLEY. OXFORD, June 5, [1871]. Accept my best thanks for your beautiful present, which is a great ornament to the drawing-room. I have to thank 1 The ribband of the Order of the Bath, of which, as Dean of Westminster, Stanley was Dean. you for very much more than this-the unvaried kindness and friendship of you and your family, which has been a great good and happiness to me. I understand now why you wanted the Balliol arms. You will be well informed about Paris from Lyulph and Colonel Stanley. Both the Commune and the Versailles people seem to be detestable; the revenges are almost worse than the crimes. I cannot help feeling that among the Commune there must have been fine fellows victims of an idea. But there will be no more ideas in France for some time to come. TO A FRIEND WHO WAS IN DANGER OF OVERWORK. [1871.] I must beg of you to grant me one favour, that you will go out of town within the week, whether your business is finished or unfinished. And do not write me a letter of reasons why this cannot be (at a great expense of labour to yourself, though your letters are always valuable and interesting to me), but just one word to say on what day you are going. Nothing is more evident to me than that you are doing wrong by this overwork, and making it less and less probable that you will complete your book. TO THE COUNTESS OF WEMYSS. TUMMEL BRIDGE, August 10, 1871. I am afraid that you are wearing yourself out with sorrow: will you let me tell you the truth about this, as he might have told you, if he had been alive? To indulge in a life-long sorrow is not natural, nor quite right. We ought, I suppose, to be first resigned to the will of God and then cheerful again after a time. You have many years of life before you (humanly speaking) and great duties to fulfil, and if you allow your mind to dwell entirely on this dark place, will you be equal to them? Is there not a real danger that the affections may become narrowed and dried up, if we allow them to be absorbed in any single feeling; and that we may be unthankful to God for the many blessings which He has left, because He has taken away one of them? It is not because I do not feel for you, but because I do, that I write this. And I venture to ask you whether sorrow should not work in some other way-in raising us to a higher level of life-in a diffused care and love of all, taking the place of an absorbing affection for one-in an absolute trust of God, though He has left us so very dark? According to each person's character, should they not try to heal their sorrow for the sake of others? I should not expect any one to be the same as they were before, after such a calamity as has fallen upon you. The world cannot have the same interest for them. But they may reconstruct their life on another basis; and that basis, if they have any depth of character, must be living for others and for God. As a matter of pleasure or pain they give up life, but they determine to fulfil their trust, and do the best which they can with it. To R. B. D. MORIER1. July 18, 1870. Did you foresee this? How I should like to have a talk with you about the matter. It seems to me, considering the visits to Biarritz, that Napoleon was deceived by Bismarck in a way that he could not make public, and so that the casus belli is more real than has as yet appeared. The debate in the French Chamber was extremely unsatisfactory. I think that Prussia is very much to blame as well as France, and that it is nonsense to say that she had given no causes for suspicion, and having done so she ought to have been willing completely to remove them. It is quite true that I have a feeling for the Emperor. He 1 Jowett was not so absorbed in his work and his College as to take no interest in the great war which was now raging, and the humiliation of France. His sympathies were largely with the French; he had even a good word for Napoleon III; and he defends both the one and the other against the attacks of his friend Morier, then Her Majesty's Minister at Darmstadt. The letters are too long to print here, but a few extracts are given to indicate his views. is a dreamer—he has had corrupt ministers, from whose maladministration he is now suffering: he has broken faith on more than one occasion. But he is a man of genius, who has had many great thoughts pass through his mind; he has shown the greatest courage; he is the real liberator of Italy, and would have been the liberator of Poland. I know he is spoken of in the language which Tacitus applies to the Roman emperors. But I never read a book, or a speech, or a letter of his without being impressed by him. He is an unsafe politician, because he is too dreamy and too full of ideas, and he either cannot or will not choose suitable instruments. September 12, 1870. It grieves me to see the Germans at Paris as much as it would to see the French at Berlin. They have all they can really gain. And for the future they cannot be perfectly safe in any case, because they cannot exterminate the French, and they are of course creating in thirty-eight millions of people sentiments of never-dying hatred which become the curse of the world in after generations. . . I don't want 'La belle France' or any other woman to be pained in her feelings. These are the things which make 'nations, like individuals, go mad.' A mad woman can be put in an asylum, not a nation. The Balliol Grace As it used to be said in Hall every day at dinner, the Scholar ‘in course' beginning, and the Dean and Fellows answering. Sch. Benedictus sit Deus in donis suis, Soc. Et sanctus in omnibus operibus suis. Sch. Adiutorium nostrum in nomine Domini est, Soc. Qui fecit caelum et terras. Sch. Sit nomen Dei benedictum Soc. Ab hoc tempore usque in saecula. Sch. Tribuere digneris, Domine Deus, omnibus nobis bona facientibus ob tuum sanctum nomen vitam aeternam. Soc. Amen. Sch. In memoria aeterna erit iustus. Soc. Ab auditione mala nunquam timebit. Sch. Funde, quaesumus, Domine Deus, in mentes nostras gratiam tuam, ut tuis hisce donis, datis a Iohanne Balliolo et Dervorguilla uxore ceterisque omnibus benefactoribus nostris, rite ad tuam gloriam utentes in vitam caelestem una cum fidelibus omnibus defunctis resurgamus, per Iesum Christum Dominum nostrum. Soc. Amen. Sch. Deus pro infinita sua clementia Ecclesiae unitatem et concordiam concedat, reginam conservet, pacemque huic regno populoque Christiano largiatur, per Iesum Christum Dominum nostrum. Soc. Amen. |