Untitled - Electric Scotland

1834-41] STUDIES IN "EDUCATION 71
the upper and lower classes. In the following year he
was again abroad, accompanied by Goulburn, Lake, and
Stanley, and during part of the time by Sir Charles and
Lady Wake.
These frequent foreign tours, and especially the pro
longed residence at Bonn, obviously gave him an excep
tional knowledge of the affairs both of Germany and
France. They were no mere holidays, but times of hard
and systematic work, and he used constantly to refer in later
years to the usefulness of the particular knowledge he had
acquired. The subject of Education, then a less popular
topic than now, continued to absorb much of his attention.
A pamphlet which he published in I839, 1
advocating
certain changes in the professorial and tutorial system at
Oxford, attracted wide notice in its careful and sugges
tive comparisons between the English, Scottish, and Con
tinental systems, about all of which he was now able to
speak from personal experience.
With reference to his work as Tutor of Balliol, Principal
Shairp
writes as follows :
"When in October 1840 I went into residence at Balliol,
Tait received me as his pupil, for at that time all the under
graduates were divided among the four Tutors, as their pupils,
over whom they had a special charge and responsibility. I con
sidered myself fortunate in having Tait for my Tutor, for he was
not only the senior, but by far the most influential of the then
Balliol Tutors. The Master, Jenkyns, was a sort of constitutional
monarch, and Tait was his Prime Minister, on whom he leant, to
whom he looked for advice and support with absolute confidence.
The other Tutors and the younger Fellows, several of whom had
been his own pupils, might each of them be cleverer in this or
that line of scholarship, but they all felt that there was in Tait a
manliness and sense and a weight of character to which they
could not but defer. The undergraduates all respected and liked
1 Hints on the Formation of a Plan for the Safe and Effectual Revival of
the Professorial System at Oxford. By a Resident Member of Convocation.