The life and letters of Benjamin Jowett, M. A., master of Balliol college, Oxford.

1850-18541 W. L. Newman's Remzniscences

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became in after years. I despair of conveying to any one who
did not know him then anything like an exact idea of what he
was. He left on me a stronger impression of genius at that time
of his life than at any other. Moments of musing and abstraction were allied in him with a singular alertness and rapidity of
mind, meditative power went hand in hand with keen insight.
'I well remember his ways. When one took him composition,
he used commonly to seat himself in a chair placed immediately
in front of the fire and close to it, and to intersperse his abrupt,
decided and pithy comments on one's work with vigorous pokes
of the fire. Occasionally he would lapse into silence, and say
nothing whatever perhaps for two or three minutes; but,
if one rose to go, one often found that his best remarks still
remained to be uttered. The silent interval had been a time of
busy thought. The same thing sometimes happened on the
walks which he often took me; I remember one day when we
walked for some miles in the Cumnor direction side by side without exchanging a word; then I said something which caught his
attention, and roused him, and for the rest of the way we talked
eagerly and without intermission. He always had a dislike for
small-talk and trivialities, and never talked unless he had something to say. I have heard of his excusing his silence and saying:
"IfI say nothing, it is not because I am out of temper, but because
I have nothing to say." His occasional abstraction or apparent
abstraction-now and then accompanied by the half-unconscious
" crooning " in a low voice of a kind of tune-never disguised to
those who knew him his real alertness or the keen watchfulness
of his interest in his pupils. In later days all this passed away,
not altogether unregretted by some of us. The intervals of
silence also became rarer; I remember a half-jocose remark
of Pattison's about him towards the end of the sixties, "Now
there's affability."
'I liked his abrupt and peremptory, yet always serene and
kindly ways. " I want you to do this or that," he would say,
poker in hand. He was good as a critic of composition, and
especially as a critic of Latin prose. He had a quick instinct
for what was Ciceronian and what was not, perhaps rather in
connexion with the flow of the sentence than in matters of
diction. He never gave me fair copies, an omission which I often