the formation of his character in early life by the example of the Gurney family: "It has given a colour to my life," he used to say. Speaking of his success at the Dublin University, he confessed, "I can ascribe it to nothing but my Earlham visits." It was from the Gurneys he "caught the infection" of self-improvement.
Contact with the good never fails to impart good, and we carry away with us some of the blessing, as travellers' garments retain the odour of the flowers and shrubs through which they have passed. Those who knew the late John Sterling intimately have spoken of the beneficial influence which he exercised on all with whom he came into personal contact. Many owed to him their first awakening to a higher being; from him they learnt what they were, and what they ought to be. Mr. Trench says of him:—"It was impossible to come in contact with his noble nature without feeling one's self in some measure ennobled and lifted up, as I ever felt when I left him, into a higher region of objects and aims than that in which one is tempted habitually to dwell." It is thus that the noble character always acts; we become insensibly elevated by him, and cannot help feeling as he does and acquiring the habit of looking at things in the same light. Such is the magical action and reaction of minds upon each other.
Artists, also, feel themselves elevated by contact with artists greater than themselves. Thus Haydn's genius was first fired by Handel. Hearing him play, Haydn's ardour for musical composition was at once excited, and but for this circumstance, he himself believed that he would never have written the 'Creation.' Speaking of Handel, he
