has astonished and annoyed many of the strongest of the party, and they call him Anglican. Good-bye.-Your most affectionate brother, J. C. SHAIRP."

The following undated letter was written to his eldest sister on the subject of Wordsworth's religion. It is a youthful letter, and possibly belongs to the year 1841, but it has an interest of its own:

Per

"What do I think of Wordsworth's religion? A question easy to be asked, not so easy to be answered. You could not have asked me one that more interested me. The thing that people generally say is that he is pantheistic. haps he is. You know how Carlyle answers the same charge made against Emerson: Ists and isms are rather becoming a weariness. Such a man does not readily rank himself under isms. Now, without admitting this defence, there is no doubt that people mislead themselves by giving hard names to men and things, and then being alarmed by the name rather than the thing. There is, however, perhaps some little ground (I say it with great diffidence) for saying so of Wordsworth. If Pantheism means a forgetting the personality of God, a confusion between the Creator and creation, a thinking of God as a motive and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things,' rather than as the Father Almighty, there is something like this in many of his poems (see especially that one on Tintern Abbey). And yet it is the tendency more or less of all very imaginative minds, all at least who live in some strong belief of the Infinite and the Unseen, and who feel that what they see is but a veil to something deeper and truer underneath. It is the form that minds

of naturally strong devotion take, when they try to represent to themselves God's infinity and omnipresence, and when they feel that all they see is divine. It is the tendency of minds of naturally high devotion, and is the highest form of the religion of Nature. But then Wordsworth had Revelation, and we cannot but wish he had brought in more

Christianity into his poems. The places where this is done most is his Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Still there is one thing never to be forgotten-that all Wordsworth's so-called Pantheism is unconscious. . . . There is a world of difference between a tendency unconsciously creeping in, and a belief consciously held and maintained. . . . One thing is striking. Almost all the best and most tender-hearted people I have ever known have loved Wordsworth. This shows how much more good there is in him than error. Few men's works, I believe, have ever gone deeper, and more impressed men's hearts. There is a large catholic charity in him—a charity not of word, but in deed and truth, such as I know not where else to find. The improvement he has made on the poetry of the age before him is his best defence. He teaches me to look on men, and all things, with a kind and loving heart, and with a deep faith in the goodness at the bottom of all things. He leads us far on the way, if he does not quite reach the haven of all Truth. No one ever yet read 'The Churchyard among the Mountains' with an understanding heart, and was not the better for it. Therefore read him, love him,

J. C. S."

CHAPTER V

REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD, AND OF OXFORD INFLUENCES AND FRIENDS

MANY sketches of Shairp's undergraduate life at Oxford have reached me, from which I select only the most characteristic, although all are full of interest. Lord Coleridge's account of these years will be found in a subsequent chapter. The following is from Dr. Bradley, the present Dean of Westminster :

"I feel most strongly the impossibility of reproducing, still more of adequately conveying to others, any faithful representation of one in many respects unlike any one else with whom I have lived in habitual intercourse. Shairp was of quite or nearly the same standing at the University as myself; but we were at different colleges, and only met occasionally in the rooms of common friends at Balliol. I have, however, a vivid recollection of the first time that I was in his company. It was in November 1840, when, as a freshman from Rugby, I was asked to join, after dining in my own college hall, a party-'a wine' in Oxford language-at A. H. Clough's. Clough was then living in lodgings, on the ground-floor of a small house, near Holywell Church, which I have often in later years pointed out to those who were interested in all connected with his memory. It was my first visit of the kind to one to whom I looked up even then with something more than ordinary schoolboy veneration; whose Rugby poems I knew largely by heart, and whose countenance, already familiar to me, though I had barely spoken to him,

E

still shines to me out of the distance as one of the most impressive, and, in a sense, of the most beautiful, that I have ever seen. I entered the room with a due feeling of youthful bashfulness. I can still recall the names and the very faces of some of the few guests whom I found there. Among them was a young scholar of Balliol, fresh from Eton as I was from Rugby, Seymour by name; we sat, I remember, opposite each other, and were introduced by Clough, and I can still recall the impression made upon me by the striking and refined features and expressive face of one, who, a year before, had easily beaten a large field of candidates, myself included, and who looked, as I said to myself, fully worthy of his boyish reputation. He was the first of those who met that day to be taken; his bright career was ended by an early death within a year or two of his coming to Oxford.1 The other guests were Richard Congreve, Blackett of Merton, and I think I am right in saying Coleridge, the present Lord Chief-Justice, and one or two more. The conversation soon became general, and turned shortly to Wordsworth, and from him to S. T. Coleridge and the Aids to Reflection. By my side sat a somewhat large and strongly-built man, with a strong dash of Scottish accent, who seemed to me to be it was a mere blunder of my own-but seemed to me to be considerably older than myself, and whom, indeed, I strangely fancied to be not an undergraduate but a visitor of Clough's. As the talk went on-not exactly in the direction to which I had thus far been accustomed at ordinary wines' I remember my neighbour becoming extremely animated, and talking with such vehemence and gesticulation that my wine-glass was sent flying; and I still can see him pausing for the moment, with perfect and unexpected grace, to apologise to me, and then plunging headlong into the now long-forgotten argument which he was maintaining against all comers. I was startled at hearing either that evening or the next morning that my neighbour was a Balliol man, a Scottish Exhibitioner from Glasgow University, scarcely older than

6

1 See Glen Desseray, etc., p. 216.

V

REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

51

myself, and who, as I heard before the term was over, had
already won a name, not only as full of enthusiasm and
fire on his favourite subjects, but also in circles very
different to that in which I had met him, as a hard rider.
From that time, however, it was long before I met him
again. I had few acquaintances at Balliol during my first
year, and at its close was non-resident, owing to a severe illness,
for many months. But after my return I met him from time
to time in the rooms of Matthew Arnold, Theodore Walrond,
and other friends. I was much interested in his poem
which gained the Newdigate in 1842; and I heard of him
often, no more indeed as a riding-man, but as one greatly
respected and liked in his own college, the writer of essays
which won the special approval of the Master, and as one
of the leaders of that energetic and able band of Scotsmen
who have so often, I believe, in the history of Balliol acted,
as they certainly did then, as links between the two societies
of scholars and commoners. We were both examined for our
B.A. degrees at the same time, and some disappointment was
felt by Shairp's friends at Balliol and elsewhere, among whom
the opinion of his abilities and power of thought was exceed- /
ingly high, at his being placed in the second class.
It was
accounted for, we always understood, by his deficiency of exact
scholarship, and consequent inaccuracy of translation-especi-
ally of, if I rightly remember, the Greek and Latin poets, whose
works were in those days included in the final examination.
From after knowledge I can well believe that the laborious
study of words and phrases, necessary to the mastery of so
large a field of classical authors as was then exacted from
candidates for honours, would have been exceedingly dis-
tasteful to him. We met after this, as I said, from time
to time, for we had many common friends. I was always
delighted to listen to his conversation, and we were, both of
us, if I may so speak, prepared to be friends ourselves, if
ever the opportunity should occur, without perhaps going
much farther in our acquaintanceship than this."

The Dean of Westminster has referred to Shairp's competing

In thes