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

66 Life of Benjamin Jowett [CHAP. III
'My first acquaintance with Jowett was as an undergraduate.
He gained the Balliol Scholarship in 1835, and I went up to
Balliol after Easter in 1837. His youthful person, his round
hairless face, which in later years made that mother of nicknames, Mrs. Grote, call him "the cherub1"; his low shoes
and white stockings; his brisk, tripping, almost childish gait;
made him a noticeable figure in Balliol quad; and they are
still present to me as a vivid image of what he was in early
youth, and the more so since the characteristic features of that
image remained traceable in him to the end. He did not
at that time, I think, give any promise of the power which
he afterwards became. I did not see much of him beyond
an occasional walk together, for he joined in no games; and
though never an ascetic, or absorbed, as Clough was, in the
theological mists of that polemical time, he was absolutely
devoid of athletic propensities, and was I believe too poor
then to indulge in the hospitality which in later years was
so great a pleasure to him and to his friends. To him, to
Brodie, to Hugh Pearson, and one or two others, I owed
a mental stimulus which was not to be found in the general
healthy, but not intellectual, society of the Eton and Harrow
men with whom I mostly lived. Towards the end of my time
at Oxford, I lost the good coach-Elder-with whom I was
reading for my degree, and betook me to two Balliol men
equally kind, and perhaps equally well-read, but very different
in their effects on a pupil's mind. One, who shall be nameless, made Aristotle's Logic as unintelligible to me as confusion
of thought in the interpreter can make the work of a great
master. The other, Jowett (I really cannot remember what
he taught me), managed to make everything he taught suggestive and productive of thought.
'Indeed, if I were to attempt to characterize in a few words
the effect which Jowett's personality had upon me through
' She was anticipated, if I mis- Another creator of nicknames,
take not, by Mr. Edward Pigott Mrs. Ferrier of St. Andrews, used
in the Leader (weekly) newspaper, to speak of him some years afterwho wrote of him, in the early wards as the 'little downy owl.'fifties, as ' the middle.- agedoherub.' L. C.