Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/387

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XVII.]
Gains and Losses.
375

large in historical work, of the efforts of some of the Public Schools to make a beginning of such work a part of elementary education, but chiefly I think to the zeal, and self-denial, and labour, and personal sympathy of the History tutors. The work is, so far as it is the bringing to bear of historical influences, interests, and inducements on the individual students, entirely their work; and their work also mainly in the other bearings of our common design, in which professorial teaching or other professorial working could be at all utilised. I wish to say this distinctly, and shall say it again before I close; all the more distinctly, because I, for my part, am well aware that, in many details of organisation and division of labour, my opinions have differed from theirs, and I would like them to remember that, where we have differed, it has not been for want of sympathy on my part, or for any wish to spare myself

Since 1876 in the body of tutors we have had some few losses; our dear friend the Dean of Winchester has left us for a place of more dignity, and more freedom for the working of his unrivalled and peculiar gifts: we are sure that he will never be idle, and whatever he does will be done well. Mr. Jayne has left us, also for a place of honour and responsibility, where his presence will be to us the earnest of sound work in our own as well as in the other departments of clerical education, and where he has already enlisted the help of one of the most successful and zealous of the younger men who have followed our line here. Of our dear friend Laing, whose absence we feel more and more every term, what can I say, but that we trust and hope that one day he may be restored to us and to the studies that he was so wonderfully qualified to develope and adorn? Well, with these home losses we have counterbalancing gains in the enlisting of new men. The continued vigour of our veterans is hardly to be called a gain, but it is a matter of profound congratulation: I rejoice to think that the Chichele Professor, Mr. Owen, and Mr. Boase are as young, and zealous, and kind, and sympathetic as they ever were, and that is as much as the best and kindest of men can be; seventeen