What it came to thus was that he availed himself to the utmost of his free hand for sowing and planting ideals—ideals that, though they might after all be vague and general things, lacking sometimes a little the clearer connections with practice, were yet a new and inspiring note to most of his hearers, who could be trusted, just so far as they were intelligent and loyal, not to be heavily embarrassed by them, not to want for fields of application. It was given him, quite unprecedentedly, to be popular, to be altogether loved and cherished, even while “rubbing it into” whomever it might concern that such unfortunates were mainly given over to mediocrity and vulgarity, and that half the crude and ugly objects and aspects, half the low standards and loose ends surrounding them and which they might take for granted with a facility and a complacency alike deplorable, represented a platitude of imagination that dishonoured the citizen on whom a University worthy of the name should have left its stamp. Happy, it would thus in fact seem, beyond any other occasion for educative influence, the immense and delightful opportunity he enjoyed, the clear field and long reach attached to preaching an esthetic crusade, to pleading for the higher amenities in general, in a new and superficially tutored, yet also but superficially prejudiced, country, where a consequently felt and noted rise of the tide of manners may be held to have come home to him, or certainly to have visited his dreams. His effect on the community at large, with allowances of time, was ever indubitable—even though such workers have everywhere to take much on trust and to remember that bushels of doctrine, and even tons of example, make at the most ounces and grains of responsive life. It can only be the very general and hopeful view that sustains and rewards—with here and there, at wide intervals, the prized individual instance of the sown seed actively emerging and flowering.