Untitled - Electric Scotland

1841] REMINISCENCES IJY DEAN LAKH 105
myself in my undergraduate days, and I can hardly help feeling
some surprise that while he was certainly influencing our char
acters, he had so little direct influence on our opinions. It must
not be forgotten, however, that he was throughout life rather a
man of action than of the deepest thought ; and, not to dwell here
upon one or two intellectual defects in this respect, his life at
Oxford was passed at a very remarkable time, which made his
position there a peculiar and a very isolated one. And cer
tainly this fact very much coloured his whole Oxford life ; for
he was almost the only tutor at once of a powerful intellect, and
of a high moral tone, who was hardly in the least influenced by
the spirit which moved almost every young man of thought in
Oxford from about 1835 to 1845, and which, at the same time, he
felt that he had no power of resisting. The tale of that move
ment has been told us lately in very different styles by three
able writers, Mr. Mozley, Mr. Mark Pattison, and Professor
Shairp, as well as in the lively and interesting description of Mr.
Newman s preaching by Sir F. Doyle ; but they all come back
to this, that the one great power which then ruled and inspired
Oxford was John Henry Newman, the influence of whose singular
combination of genius and devotion has had no parallel there,
either before or since ;
the only persons who were left outside the
charmed circle being a somewhat apathetic race, the twenty or
twenty-two heads of houses, and a few tutors, of whom Tait was
the only one of real power. If this statement seems to you
exaggerated, I must remind you that^it is scarcely so strong as the
words of Professor Shairp, himself a Scotchman and a friend of
Tait s, and one who, if his own genius and devotion led him keenly
to appreciate Newman, was no adherent of the movement, but
simply spoke of what he had seen as a matter of history. I
daresay you may have mentioned this already, but it may be
worth while even to repeat Shairp s own words The influence
which Newman had gained, he says he was there in 1842-
apparently without setting himself to seek it, was altogether
unlike anything else in our time. A mysterious veneration had
by degrees gathered round him, till now it was almost as if some
Ambrose or Augustine of elder days had reappeared : and he
adds, There was not, in Oxford at least, a reading man who
was not more or less indirectly influenced by it. Only the very
idle or the very, frivolous were proof against it. ... It raised
the tone of average morality in Oxford to a level which perhaps