Dr. Coit had, as it were, no secular side to his human intercourse, and the social side of St. Paul’s School was, in consequence, always a little stiff and ecclesiastical. On the other hand, his romantic and spontaneous feelings were permitted the outlet of secular literature, both ancient and modern; and he inspired his school with a love of letters. You were somehow made welcome to the joys of reading. The old-fashioned family education and atmosphere of a gentleman’s home qualified the boarding-school book-shelf. An interest in cultivation often goes with high-pitched, ecclesiastical natures; witness the outburst of literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and all that profound thought which makes that epoch in some ways outshine the Renaissance. Not only did Dr. Coit enjoy romantic literature, but he was himself like some character in mediæval romance--like Arthur, or Merlin; and the power of his personality was so great that whenever I am at St. Paul’s, I still feel as if the old Doctor were, somehow, not far away. I should hardly be surprised to see him step out from behind a clump of bushes on the margin of the stream, or to come across his rapt figure, on the athletic field, standing as I have seen him stand to watch the games, shading his eyes with his hand. Dr. Coit was one of those saints who come into the world determined to found something: they are predestinate founders. They make and occupy the thing they found, repelling all the world beside, fleeing from all the world except this; and they generally become tyrants within the boundaries of their own creation. The tyrant founder-saint is a well-known figure in the Middle Ages; St. Bernard is a typical example; and Dr. Coit would have been more readily understood in any previous age of the world than he was in his own. He was in himself a piece of the Middle Ages, and to have known him is to have come in contact with all the piety, the romanticism, the mystery, the beauty, the depth and power of human emotion which flamed over Europe in Mediæval times, and which have been temporarily forgotten. To-day these provinces of human existence are abandoned to the art critic, to the moralist, and to the sentimental writer--to the very classes of persons who are the least likely to understand them. If we except the German philosophic historian, I suppose that no person in the world is so cut off by nature from an understanding of St. Francis or of Thomas Aquinas as is the modern æsthetic person, who cultivates a sympathetic interest in religion. The only hope of understanding the Middle Ages is through a living personal belief in Christianity.