Does all this smell of thyme about my feet Conclude my visit to your holy hill In personal presence, or but testify The rustling of your vesture through my dreams With influent odours? We need not doubt it; she is worthy to be counted among these, The only teachers who instruct mankind From just a shadow on a charnel-wall To find man's veritable stature out Erect, sublime--the measure of a man-- And that's the measure of an angel, says The apostle. THE LATE MASTER OF TRINITY (DR. W. H. THOMPSON) THE interest that attaches to the life of a notable man is generally very complex: it entwines itself with the great events which our hero helped to bring about, his personal relations with the other great men of his time, his view of the movements agitating society. And then there is a further interest in his private life. We desire to see the secret sources from which he drew the inspiration he carried into the outside world; we are anxious to know whether he was most real when before the public, and made his inner life subserve his outer, or whether he withdrew from the dust of battle and the rush of the world, into the quiet of his own circle, feeling that he was returning home. All these varying moods are an attractive study: when the mask falls away and we know that he was most dispirited when he seemed most serene, or in reality buoyed up by a divine elation when apparently crushed by a sorrow that seemed irreparable--the disentangling the central strand from the variegated web is a task of fascinating difficulty. But in the life which we are here endeavouring to trace there was no such bewildering complexity. The secret history of an essentially reticent mind cannot be written; it is at the best sympathetic guessing. In a life where events are rare, circumstances monotonous, a character with few friends and fewer intimates, withdrawn alike from the political, the religious, the social arena, there can be little to record, unless there has been some definite _line_ taken throughout, some marked attitude which a nature has consistently maintained towards the outer world. In the case of the late Master of Trinity we can lay our finger at once upon the characteristic which made him what he was--which gave to a personality such an exclusive strength that when it fades from the world we feel that no replacing is possible. He stood to the action and thought of the present day in the character of a judge: like Rhadamanthus in the old fables, who dealt not with motives or tendencies, but with recorded acts, who sate to give judgment upon them, his function was one of pure criticism. How much that is needed in an age where on the one hand so much is excused on the score of irresistible fatality, while on the other hand such an unreasonable preponderance is given to the value of action, is acutely felt in the face of such a loss as his.