with whom he was most intimate at Balliol and Oriel, several have since obtained distinction in the world; some were cut off at a still earlier age, leaving on the memory of their friends a deep impression of what they had been, and of what they were still capable of becoming. Those who still survive of the men of that time, who were intimate with one another, feel that one more of the best among their friends – to meet whom in later life, on his occasional visits to Oxford and London, was one of their greatest pleasures – has been taken from them. The second part of his active career was passed in a larger and less familiar sphere. From 1859 to 1868 he filled various important educational offices in India, ultimately becoming Director of Public Instruction and Member of the Legislative Council of Bombay. Nothing can show the variety and versatility of his gifts more than his success in a career so different from that of the student of literature and philosophy, in which he first gained distinction. Not only were his services to the cause of education in India acknowledged in important official documents, but his active kindness is still remembered by some of those who were his students at Elphinstone College. His duties in Edinburgh involved a complete change from his previous work both in Oxford and in India. They gave no scope to his admirable powers of teaching, by which he won distinction at Oxford. He was called upon to administer a long-established educational system, not to initiate and organise a new one, as he had done in India. He had, in the earlier years at least of his Principalship, rather to attend to a number of minute and multifarious details, than to attempt anything on a great scale. But from the first he felt himself identified with the work here, as he had done in India: he became attached to the University with that fondness for all his surroundings which at all times came naturally to him; and he most earnestly desired to see it hold a higher place in literature, science, and professional teaching, than it had at any former time. With the expansion of the University within the last ten years, and the call for new buildings to meet that expansion, he recognised a new mode of serving it, for which his tact and knowledge of men, his courtesy and conciliatory temper, admirably fitted him ; and while it is to the munificence of many benefactors that the University owes its recent enlargement, it will be acknowledged by those associated with him in the task of laying the claims of the University before the public, that the personal influence of the Principal was a powerful agent in attracting that munificence. Long before it had occurred to any one else, his imagination recognised the completion of the third century in the life of the University as a great opportunity; and it was by that idea that he was stimulated to devote years to the composition of his history, which, whether it may or may not satisfy critics as a work of art, is perhaps the greatest literary monument ever raised to the honour of any university.
It might at first sight appear that this was, in some respects, a broken career; and that more effectual work might have been done and greater distinction acquired had his life been passed in one sphere of duty. He would certainly have taken a still higher rank than he now holds among the
