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

Relation to Contemporaries

227

ripe and varied experience of his host, who had vivid
recollections of the state of England at the beginning
of the century. Dr. Lushington, when in Parliament,
had advocated the abolition of capital punishment, and
used to describe the feelings of the peasantry in the
home counties, who, when a relative went up to London,
regarded him as literally doomed to the gallows. Jowett
often repeated this. To the young people at Ockham,
their father's guest appeared as a mild and amiable
cleric, in whom they saw no promise of great things
to come.
Hitherto Jowett's relations to those about him had been
almost uniformly friendly. Some may have thought him
opinionated, but there is no trace of any actual discord.
He goes to visit Scott in his country parish, and does
duty for him when he is 'blind and solitary,' relinquishing pleasant plans for this purpose; he stays with him
again under altered circumstances, rejoicing in his new
prospects, and the children insist on his coming out
to walk with them. He looks up Lake, when on the
Continent and out of health, as if they had not enough
of one another in Term-time; reads Trench's Hulsean
Lectures aloud to him with frank comments 1, and works
in his favour when a candidate for the Head Mastership
of Rugby in I849. He presses Henry Wall's claims
the climate of Oxford. Some repeated in a letter to Stanley:
years afterwards he told a party 'Is there one theological writer
of guests that a great opportunity of the present day who can be
had been lost in making the said to be morally and intelG.W.R., when this had been part lectually truthful? And if so,
of the great engineer's original the mournful fact forces itself
plan, but had been opposed by upon one that there is no elder
the Heads of Houses, with two person in whose footsteps one can
exceptions-Wynter of St. John's, tread, however little or nothing
and Harrington of Brasenose. it is possible for us to do.'
1The substance of these is (1846.)
Q 2