His letters have been collected and piously given to the world by Mr. Irwin, one of his closest friends. By far the greatest number of them belong to those last five years in the Island--the happiest, perhaps, of his life, certainly the happiest temperamentally. "Never the time and the place . . ." but at least Brown was more fortunate than most men. He realised his dream, and it did not disappoint him. He could not carry off his friends to share it (and it belongs to criticism of these volumes to say that he was exceptionally happy in his friends), but he could return and visit them or stay at home and write to them concerning the realisation, and be sure they understood. Therefore, although we desire more letters of the Clifton period--although twenty years are omitted, left blank to us--those that survive confirm a fame which, although never wide, was always unquestioned within its range. There could be no possibility of doubt concerning Brown. He was absolute. He lived a fierce, shy, spiritual life; a wise man, keeping the child in his heart: he loved much and desired permanence in the love of his kind. "Diuturnity," says his great seventeenth-century namesake, "is a dream and folly of expectation. There is nothing strictly immortal but immortality." And yet, _prosit amasse!_ The railway took me on to Oxford-- "Like faithful hound returning For old sake's sake to each loved track With heart and memory burning." "I well remember," writes Mrs. Green of her husband, the late John Richard Green, "the passionate enthusiasm with which he watched from the train for the first sight of the Oxford towers against the sky:" and although our enthusiasm nowadays has to feed on a far tamer view than that which saluted our forefathers when the stage-coach topped the rise of Shotover and its passengers beheld the city spread at their feet, yet what faithful son of Oxford can see her towers rise above the water-meadows and re-greet them without a thrill? In the year 1688, and in a book entitled _The Guardian's Instruction_, a Mr. Stephen Penton gave the world a pleasing and lifelike little narrative--superior, in my opinion, to anything in _Verdant Green_-- telling us how a reluctant father was persuaded to send his son to Oxford; what doubts, misgivings, hesitations he had, and how they were overcome. I take the story to be fictitious. It is written in the first person, professedly by the hesitating parent: but the parent can hardly have been Penton, for the story will not square with what we know of his life. The actual Penton was born, it seems, in 1640, and educated at Winchester and New College; proceeded to his fellowship, resided from 1659 to 1670, and was Principal of St. Edmund's Hall from 1675 to 1683. He appears to have been chaplain to the Earl of Aylesbury, and, according to Antony a Wood, possessed a "rambling head." He died in 1706.