Sir John Coleridge knew Keble probably as long and as intimately as any one; and on the whole, he had the most entire sympathy with his friend's spirit, even where he disagreed with his opinions. He thoroughly understood and valued the real and living unity of a character which mostly revealed itself to the outer world by what seemed jerks and discordant traits. From early youth, through manhood to old age, he had watched and tested and loved that varied play and harmony of soul and mind, which was sometimes tender, sometimes stern, sometimes playful, sometimes eager; abounding with flashes of real genius, and yet always inclining by instinctive preference to things homely and humble; but which was always sound and unselfish and thorough, endeavouring to subject itself to the truth and will of God. To Sir John Coleridge all this was before him habitually as a whole; he could take it in, not by putting piece by piece together, but because he saw it. And besides being an old and affectionate and intelligent friend, he was also a discriminating one. In his circumstances he was as opposite to Keble as any one could be; he was a lawyer and man of the world, whose busy life at Westminster had little in common with the studies or pursuits of the divine and the country parson. Such an informant presents a picture entirely different in kind from the comments and criticisms of those who can judge only from Mr. Keble's writings and religious line, or from the rare occasions in which he took a public part. These appearances, to many who willingly acknowledge the charm which has drawn to him the admiration and affection of numbers externally most widely at variance with him, do not always agree together. People delight in his poetry who hate his theology. They cannot say too much of the tenderness, the depth, the truth, the quick and delicate spirit of love and purity, which have made his verses the best interpreters and soothers of modern religious feeling; yet, in the religious system from which his poetry springs, they find nothing but what seems to them dry, harsh, narrow, and antiquated. He attracts and he repels; and the attraction and repulsion are equally strong. They see one side, and he is irresistible in his simplicity, humbleness, unworldliness, and ever considerate charity, combined with so much keenness and freshness of thought, and such sure and unfailing truth of feeling. They see another, and he seems to them full of strange unreality, strained, exaggerated, morbid, bristling with a forced yet inflexible intolerance. At one moment he seems the very ideal of a Christian teacher, made to win the sympathy of all hearts; the next moment a barrier rises in the shape of some unpopular doctrine or some display of zealous severity, seeming to be a strange contrast to all that was before, which utterly astonishes and disappoints. Mr. Keble was very little known to the public in general,