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

1836-1840] Balliol Sixty Years since

57

The following recollections of the Rev. Hay S. Escott
may be compared with the preceding. His account of
the teaching at Balliol about this time is especially
valuable:
'At the period of Jowett's election the undergraduates of
the College numbered about eighty; but this small number
had in it a very large amount of intellectual power and energy
of life. It was rather sharply divided into sets, and even
at the tables in Hall, open to all, this division was generally
preserved. But still the borderers in each set were more or
less also members of the adjoining set, and a man might have
friends in other sets than his own. But it was the stirring
activity of the College which most struck the new members
as they joined it. Of course in this vigorous life the Scholars
took the lead; but it was not confined to them, and the
presence of such men, so intellectual and so studious as
Lonsdale, Stanley, Goulburn, and Lake, may well be supposed
to have kindled and stimulated many minds of less conspicuous power. But much was also due to the authorities
of the College. In Dr. E. Jenkyns' (afterwards Dean of
Wells) it had a Master, according to his light, thoroughly
devoted to its interest. He was not a man of a great and
large mind-and width of thought was neither cultivated nor
affected in his day-but he was eminently practical, and
possessed of shrewd common sense, though deficient in
delicacy of touch when handling minds more complex and
more sensitive than his own. His dignity may have been
somewhat pompous, and his energy bustling, but he honestly
exerted all his powers for the improvement of the College,
considering no part of its machinery beneath his notice; and
the result of his exertions was seen in the character of the
men he gathered round him, first as Scholars or Commoners,
then as Fellows and Tutors, by whose agency the prestige
of Balliol was so rapidly and greatly raised. At the time
of which we write, Moberly had just left Oxford to become
Head Master of Winchester, and afterwards Bishop of Salisbury.
1 See Oakeley's 'Balliol under Dr. Jenkyns,' in Reminiscences of
Oxford, Oxford Historical Society, I892.