Untitled - Electric Scotland

io 4 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. iv.
Metapheesics than to scholarship. Tait s great power of ready
and vigorous speech, which was afterwards one main secret of
his strength as Bishop of London, and in the House of Lords,
helped him in giving lectures where animation and clearness
were particularly required. He was indeed then, as I think he
always continued to be through life, far better in extempore
addresses than as a writer ;
and his power of speaking was lighted
up by a gift of humour which he could use very effectively when
it was needed : one or two sets down to some of our liveliest
scholars are even now hardly forgotten. He was, in fact, on
occasions, though not very oftenH impulsive enough ;
and though
his manner was always courteous and gentlemanlike, we used to
say that he was a thorough specimen of the perfervidum Scotorum
ingenium. Meanwhile his intellectual character as a teacher
often came out in lively hits at anything which he thought over-
poetical or mystical ; he was anything but fond of Plato, very
impatient of his and Aristotle s discussions on Ideas, and
was currently reported to have called one favourite writer
I think his own countryman Brown a long-winded old ass/
while we retorted by humorous criticisms on a rather weary
disquisition between the Fancy and the Imagination, which he
had crammed up for our benefit out of Wordsworth and Cole
ridge. As to his Divinity Lectures, he was, as well as I remember,
a good deal exercised by the Calvinism of the lyth Article;
and indeed, when he was on the point of standing for a Glasgow
Professorship of Greek in 1840, where the acceptance of a Predestinarian
Article was then generally swallowed as a mere
matter of form, he at once, on hearing of this, declined to be
come a candidate.
"Such, regarded merely as a Lecturer, the first aspect in
which undergraduates would look at him, was the view which we
should mostly have taken of Tait, as vigorous, acute, fluent and
felicitous in language, and on the whole, so far as I had the
means of judging, the ablest lecturer in his day at Oxford. And
some of us soon saw far more than this ; and as a certain stiffness
which hung about him during most of his earlier life gradually
thawed, we quickly began to feel the straightforwardness and
manly simplicity of his character, combined with a thorough
courtesy of mind and manner, and with a genuine warmth of
heart, a little veiled by his reserve. In all these it respects is
difficult for me to express my own sense of all that I owed him