of studying anything of this world for its own sake, of perfecting works of art, of cultivating the subtle forces and spells of language to give attractiveness to his writings. Abruptness, inadequacy, and obscurity of expression were light matters, and gave him little concern, compared with the haunting fear of unreal words. This "seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness," as he understood it, was the basis of all that he was; it was really and unaffectedly his governing principle, the root of his affections and his antipathies, just as to other men is the passion for scientific discovery or political life. But within these limits, and jealously restrained by these conditions, a strongly marked character, exuberant with power and life, and the play of individual qualities, displayed itself. There were two intellectual sides to his mind--one which made him a poet, quickness and delicacy of observation and sympathetic interpretation, the realising and anticipating power of deep feeling and penetrative imagination; the other, at first sight, little related to poetry, a hard-headed, ingenious, prosaic shrewdness and directness of common sense, dealing practically with things as they are and on the whole, very little curious about scientific questions and precision, argumentative in a fashion modelled on Bishop Butler, and full of logical resource, good and, often it must be owned, bad. It was a mind which unfolded first under the plain, manly discipline of an old-fashioned English country parsonage, where the unshowy piety and strong morality and modest theology of the middle age of Anglicanism, the school of Pearson, Bull, and Wilson, were supreme. And from this it came under the new influences of bold and independent thought which were beginning to stir at Oxford; influences which were at first represented by such men as Davison, Copleston, and, above all, Whately; influences which repelled Keble by what he saw of hardness, shallowness, and arrogance, and still more of self-sufficiency and intellectual display and conceit in the prevailing tone of speculation, but which nevertheless powerfully affected him, and of which he showed the traces to the last Sir John Coleridge is disappointing as to the amount of light which he throws on the process which was going on in Keble's mind during the fifteen years or so between his degree and the _Christian Year_; but there is one touch which refers to this period. Speaking in 1838 of Alexander Knox, and expressing dislike of his position, "as on the top of a high hill, seeing which way different schools tend," and "exercising a royal right of eclecticism over all," he adds:-- I speak the more feelingly because I know I was myself inclined to eclecticism at one time; and if it had not been for my father and my brother, where I should have been now, who can say?