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102 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. iv.
The following letter from Dean Lake of Durham may
be appropriately inserted here. Many of the facts to
which he refers have been already recorded in these pages,
but to omit these references would be to spoil the com
pleteness of a letter which has an independent and peculiar
value :-
" MY
"DEANERY, DURHAM, 2 ^d March 1888.
DEAR DEAN OF WINDSOR, When you asked me to
contribute my recollections of eur dear friend, the late Arch
bishop of Canterbury, to your Memoir of his life, I could not
hesitate to make some attempt to do so, for I have never ceased
to feel his loss, nor have I ever had a friend whom I have
known so long and so intimately, and of whom my remembrances
are still so fresh.
"The first time I ever saw Archbishop Tait was when he
was reading the second Lesson in chapel, as a young Proba
tionary Fellow of Balliol, in October 1835. I had heard of
his ability, particularly as a vigorous, and sometimes a very
fiery, speaker, at the Union, and as I knew he was to be my
tutor, I was naturally anxious to see him. I had expected one
of the scholars to read the lesson, whose manner, I was told,
was heavy and pompous, and instead of this, a young and very
good-looking man walked from the Fellows seats to the Lectern,
and read rapidly, and with great animation, the second Evening
Lesson. Who was that? I asked Stanley, with some surprise,
when chapel was over.
that was our new Tutor, Tait.
* Oh !
He gave me at once that impression of strength and spirit
which I always associated with him through life. I soon
became almost, or quite, his earliest College pupil ; and felt
at once his genuine kindness and interest in his pupils. In
those days at Oxford I know not how it is now intimacies
between tutors and pupils ripened rapidly. I was his companion
in a short tour in Belgium and Germany in 1837, and again in
1839, and during my last undergraduate year in 1838 was
constantly with him ; and this was of course still more the
case during the years we were Fellows together from 1839 to
1842. In 1842 Dr. Arnold s death caused a vacancy
in the
head-mastership at Rugby, and some of Arnold s old pupils,
particularly Stanley and myself, were very anxious for Tait s