to impart. And yet we are
beating about the bush and missing the essential man, for he was
imprehensible--"Volcanic," the Bishop of Hereford calls him, and must go
to the Bay of Naples to fetch home a simile:

"We can find plenty of beauty in the familiar northern scenes; but we
miss the pent-up forces, the volcanic outbursts, the tropic glow, and
all the surprising manifold and tender and sweet-scented outpourings
of soil and sunshine, so spontaneous, so inexhaustibly rich, and with
the heat of a great fire burning and palpitating underneath all the
time."

Natures more masterfully commanding I have known: never one more
remarkable. In the mere possession of him, rather than in his direct
influence, all Cliftonians felt themselves rich. We were at least as
proud of him as Etonians of the author of "Ionica." But no comparisons
will serve. Falstaffian--with a bent of homely piety; Johnsonian--with a
fiery Celtic heat and a passionate adoration of nature: all such epithets
fail as soon as they are uttered. The man was at once absolute and
Protean: entirely sincere, and yet a different being to each separate
friend. "There was no getting to the end of Brown."

I have said that we--those of us, at any rate, who were not of Brown's
House--were conscious of a rich and honourable possession in him, rather
than of an active influence. Yet that influence must not be underrated.
Clifton, as I first knew it, was already a great school, although less
than twenty years old. But, to a new-comer, even more impressive than its
success among schools, or its aspirations, was a firmness of tradition
which (I dare to say) would have been remarkable in a foundation of five
times its age. It had already its type of boy; and having discovered it
and how to produce it, fell something short of tolerance towards other
types. For the very reason which allows me with decency to call the type
an admirable one, I may be excused for adding that the tradition demanded
some patience of those who could not easily manage to conform with it.
But there the tradition stood, permanently rooted in a school not twenty
years old. Is it fanciful to hold that Brown's passion for 'continuity'
had much to do with planting and confirming it? Mr. Irwin quotes for us a
passage from one of his sermons to the school: "Suffer no chasm to
interrupt this glorious tradition. . . . Continuous life . . . that is
what we want--to fe