An admirable specimen of this highest description of wit is given--among dozens of others indeed--by his daughter in her biography of him, which delighted me much when I read it, and which may be cited because it is very brilliant and may be given shortly. It will be found at the 38th page of the first volume of Miss Whately’s work. The Archbishop, writing of the controversy respecting the observance of the Sabbath, says, “This is a case in which men impose on themselves by the fallacy of the thaumatrope. On one side are painted (to obviate the absurdity of a probable law) the plain, earnest, and repeated injunctions to the Jews relative to their Sabbath; on the other side (to obviate the consequence of our having to keep the Jewish Sabbath) we have the New Testament allusions to the Christian assemblies on the first day of the week. By a repeated and rapid twirl these two images are blended into one picture in the mind. But a steady view will show that they are on opposite sides of the card.” I remember a favourite saying of Whately’s to the effect that the difficulty of giving a good definition of anything increased in proportion to the commonness of the thing to be defined. And he would illustrate his dictum by saying “Define me a teacup!” A trial of the experiment will probably convince the experimenter of the correctness of Whately’s proposition. Whether it may have been that any antagonism between Whately and Shuttleworth caused the former to be prejudiced against Wiccamical things and men, or whether the relationship of the two feelings were _vice versâ_, I cannot say. But I certainly thought and think still, that I suffered in his estimation from the fact that I was a Wykehamist. In writing on educational matters in or about 1830 (p. 79 of Miss Whately’s first volume), Whately says: “To compare schools generally with colleges generally may seem a vague inquiry, but take the most in repute of each--Eton, Westminster, Harrow, etc., v. Oriel, Brasenose, Balliol, Christchurch, etc., etc.” Now, I cannot but feel that so singular an omission of Winchester from so short a list of the schools “most in repute,” glaringly in contradiction as it was with all that the whole English world--even the non-academical world--knew to be the fact, could have been caused only by preconceived and unreasoning prejudice. Of course to me the utterance above quoted comes only as a confirmation of what the personal observation of my undergraduate days led me to feel, for I knew nothing of it till I read Miss Whately’s volumes published in 1866.