The most interesting personality among these first settlers was Kendall. Wayward and erring, passionate and ungovernable as he was, a close study of his letters shows a depth of sin and penitence, together with a breadth and boldness of philosophical speculation, which fascinates the reader. Alone among the missionaries he seems to have tried to approach the Maori from his own side, and to enter the inmost recesses of his thought: "I am now, after a long, anxious, and painful study, arriving at the very foundation and groundwork of the Cannibalism and Superstitions of these Islanders. All their notions are metaphysical, and I have been so poisoned with the apparent sublimity of their ideas, that I have been almost completely turned from a Christian to a heathen." Like the ancient Gnostics, Kendall tried to combine Christianity with a sublimated version of pagan superstitions; and if moral restrictions stood in the way, he cast them aside. "I was reduced," he says, "to a state so dreadful that I had given myself entirely up, and was utterly regardless of what would become both of body and soul." The details of his strange career cannot, of course, be given here. He has been represented as an utter hypocrite, and evidence is not wanting to give colour to the charge. But another and more favourable view is not only possible: it is forced upon anyone who studies his self-revelation through his letters. He seems to have hoped that his ordination would have given him moral strength and stability, but he had to admit that he had never been so strongly tempted to sin, so unable to resist it, or so ingloriously foiled, as since his return from England. Marsden's sharp exercise of discipline, though it elicited outbursts of passion, seems to have had a healing effect. "Blessed be God," he writes, "who has certainly undertaken for me. His sharp rebuke has laid me low; yet why should I repine, since He has inclined me to seek His face again?" Upon his expulsion from the mission, he retired to a house he had built at "Pater Noster Valley," and after a few months left the country. His great services in reducing the Maori language to written form have hardly been sufficiently recognised. Marsden, like the other settlers, could never adapt himself to the Italian vowel sounds, and at his request Kendall wrote out a new vocabulary on a different system; but he soon found it unsatisfactory, and returned to the principles which he had worked out with Professor Lee. For the rest of his life--in South America and in Australia--he still tried to perfect his Maori Grammar. But the tragedy of his life outweighs the value of his philological efforts. If ever a New Zealand Goethe should arise, he may find the materials for his Faust in the history of Thomas Kendall.