embling footsteps,
and then draw back appalled at the sombre prospect. Arthur was like
one further up the pass, who had turned a corner, so to speak, and
saw the road plain.

He found a thoroughgoing determinist who was still faithful to the
voice of duty, still striving upwards; he found that his theories,
far from giving him a sense of gloom and hopelessness, rather
bestowed on him a frank expectant habit of soul; a readiness to weigh
circumstances, however small, to overlook nothing as trivial or
common; and a serene trust in an invisible all-ruling Father
([Greek: pantokrator], as he used to say), who really was
ordering the world in the smallest details when He seemed to be
ordering it least, and who wished the best for His children--far
better than they had insight to wish for themselves, and who
thus could be trusted not to be inflicting any useless blow, any
meaningless torment, even when things looked blackest and the world
most unintelligible.

I do not maintain that Arthur never flagged or swerved from this; the
letter on page 164 will show it was far otherwise: but this was his
deliberate habit of mind; this was the ideal that he was faithful to,
with all allowances for a humanity, and a humanity sorely tried.

He was an ambitious man by nature; I am sure of that: _that_ he
conquered. He was indolent by nature, averse to detail, and motion,
and change: _that_ he conquered by deliberate rough travel. He
disliked new people: _that_ he set himself to conquer. In the prime
of his life, being of a nature to which health and ordinary enjoyments
of life were very delightful and precious, death was suddenly and
hopelessly set before him; he loved and was disappointed; and the
one charge that was given him, the education of his friend's boy,
was overwhelmed and ended in a moment by a little act of boyish
carelessness. Keenly sensitive to physical pain, the last years of
his life were racked with it, every week, almost every day.

Such are the materials of a life. Apparently self-regarding in idea,
and prematurely cut short in fact, it has left results on a small
circle of friends that will never die. And why?

Because, in spite of every trial and every rebuff, he preserved at
heart a serenity that was not thoughtlessness, a cheerfulness that
was not hilarity, a humour that was not cynicism. The biographer has
thought fit to give expression to his darkest hours, and they were
not few; they may appear in the lif