ong a time, had not a great change taken place in
the circumstances of that counter-movement which had already started
with the view of resisting it. For myself, I was not the person to
take the lead of a party; I never was, from first to last, more than
a leading author of a school; nor did I ever wish to be anything
else. This is my own account of the matter, and I say it, neither as
intending to disown the responsibility of what was done, nor as if
ungrateful to those who at that time made more of me than I deserved,
and did more for my sake and at my bidding than I realised myself.
I am giving my history from my own point of sight, and it is as
follows:--I had lived for ten years among my personal friends; the
greater part of the time, I had been influenced, not influencing; and
at no time have I acted on others, without their acting upon me. As
is the custom of a university, I had lived with my private, nay, with
some of my public, pupils, and with the junior fellows of my college,
without form or distance, on a footing of equality. Thus it was
through friends, younger, for the most part, than myself, that my
principles were spreading. They heard what I said in conversation,
and told it to others. Undergraduates in due time took their degree,
and became private tutors themselves. In this new _status_, in turn,
they preached the opinions which they had already learned themselves.
Others went down to the country, and became curates of parishes.
Then they had down from London parcels of the Tracts, and other
publications. They placed them in the shops of local booksellers,
got them into newspapers, introduced them to clerical meetings, and
converted more or less their rectors and their brother curates. Thus
the Movement, viewed with relation to myself, was but a floating
opinion; it was not a power. It never would have been a power, if it
had remained in my hands. Years after, a friend, writing to me in
remonstrance at the excesses, as he thought them, of my disciples,
applied to me my own verse about St. Gregory Nazianzen, "Thou couldst
a people raise, but couldst not rule." At the time that he wrote to
me, I had special impediments in the way of such an exercise of
power; but at no time could I exercise over others that authority,
which under the circumstances was imperatively required. My great
principle ever was, live and let live. I never had the staidness or
dignity necessary for a leader. To the last I never rec