eyes and faces for some light of sympathy which was always
escaping him, and which he was powerless to compel. He met it for the
first time in Robert Elsmere. The susceptible, poetical boy was struck
at some favourable moment by that romantic side of the ineffective
tutor--his silence, his melancholy, his personal beauty--which no one
else, with perhaps one or two exceptions among the older men, cared to
take into account; or touched perhaps by some note in him, surprised in
passing, of weariness or shrinking, as compared with the contemptuous
tone of the College towards him. He showed his liking impetuously,
boyishly, as his way was, and thenceforward during his University career
Langham became his slave. He had no ambition for himself; his motto
might have been that dismal one--'The small things of life are odious to
me, and the habit of them enslaves me; the great things of life are
eternally attractive to me, and indolence and fear put them by;' but for
the University chances of this lanky, red-haired youth--with his
eagerness, his boundless curiosity, his genius for all sorts of lovable
mistakes--he disquieted himself greatly. He tried to discipline the
roving mind, to infuse into the boy's literary temper the delicacy, the
precision, the subtlety of his own. His fastidious, critical habits of
work supplied exactly that antidote which Elsmere's main faults of haste
and carelessness required. He was always holding up before him the
inexhaustible patience and labour involved in all true knowledge; and it
was to the germs of critical judgment so implanted in him that Elsmere
owed many of the later growths of his development--growths with which we
have not yet to concern ourselves.

And in return, the tutor allowed himself rarely, very rarely, a moment
of utterance from the depths of his real self. One evening in the summer
term following the boy's matriculation, Elsmere brought him an essay
after Hall, and they sat on talking afterwards. It was a rainy,
cheerless evening; the first contest of the Boats week had been rowed in
cold wind and sleet; a dreary blast whistled through the College.
Suddenly Langham reached out his hand for an open letter. 'I have had an
offer, Elsmere,' he said abruptly.

And he put it into his hand. It was the offer of an important Scotch
professorship, coming from the man most influential in assigning it. The
last occupant of the post had been a scholar of European eminence.
Langham's contr