The writer would then probably speak of the address delivered by the Principal to the students on the 28th of October, which, even if no other record of him survived, would prove that Edinburgh University was, from the year 1868 till the year 1884, presided over by a man of remarkable qualities of heart, mind, and imagination; full of enthusiasm and reverence, regulated and controlled by common-sense and practical sagacity; dignified and simple in his bearing; holding a high ideal of what the University ought to be, and at the same time loving it with loyal affection as it actually was; generous and kindly in his relations to his colleagues, most solicitous for the welfare of the students over whom he presided, and courteous and considerate in all his intercourse with them; one, too, who could speak and write with grace arid power on great occasions, as he did with grace and playful humour, in which there was no sting, on the lighter occasions of social meetings. Through all this memorable year, in the relations of the University to the outside world, to the men of learning and science who came from foreign universities, to students and graduates, and in the conduct of all its internal affairs, he stood forth the living representative of the spirit of the University. Then, when he had just witnessed and inaugurated the commencement of what he confidently looked forward to as a new and greater era of academic progress, came the stroke, tragically sudden and unexpected, which deprived the University of his great administrative ability, his colleagues of one whom in all their relations with him they felt to be a personal friend; the students of the University of one who had a heart still young enough to sympathise with their amusements, while he had the wisdom, based on wide culture and large intercourse with the world, to know and hold before them the ideal of character at which they should aim; and which took from the social life of Edinburgh one who met all classes with simple cordiality and urbanity, and who left upon all who came in any way into close contact with him, an impression of intellectual power, – of a large heart, and of great public spirit, of one exceptionally free from personal vanity, ambition, or self-seeking of any kind, and who found his happiness in doing his duty, in the minutest details as well as in the largest schemes for its improvement, to the institution to which he came sixteen years before as a stranger.
While it was with the University of Edinburgh that the last and longest part of his career was identified, and while it is there that the sense of his loss is freshest, yet his name is still remembered for excellent work done in two other widely different spheres. For ten years after taking his degree at Oxford he worked as a private tutor, and occasionally as a public examiner there; and the appreciation of what he was and what he did then, was shown by the recent bestowal of the honorary degree of D.C.L. upon him by the University, and by his election as an Honorary Fellow of Oriel, the college of which he was a distinguished actual Fellow between the years 1849 and 1859. But more than by any outward signs of honour, his qualities of mind and heart are attested by the lasting affection felt for him by contemporaries who formerly stood to him in the relation of tutor or pupil, or simply of fellow-student. Among those
