first year at Trinity, & young man joined the
college who rapidly became, in spite of various practical disadvantages,
a leader among the best and keenest of his fellows. He was poor and held
a small scholarship; but it was soon plain that his health was not equal
to the Tripos routine, and that the prizes of the place, brilliant as
was his intellectual endowment, were not for him. After an inward
struggle, of which none perhaps but Aldous Raeburn had any exact
knowledge, he laid aside his first ambitions and turned himself to
another career. A couple of hours' serious brainwork in the day was all
that was ever possible to him henceforward. He spent it, as well as the
thoughts and conversation of his less strenuous moments, on the study of
history and sociology, with a view to joining the staff of lecturers for
the manufacturing and country towns which the two great Universities,
touched by new and popular sympathies, were then beginning to organise.
He came of a stock which promised well for such a pioneer's task. His
father had been an able factory inspector, well-known for his share in
the inauguration and revision of certain important factory reforms; the
son inherited a passionate humanity of soul; and added to it a magnetic
and personal charm which soon made him a remarkable power, not only in
his own college, but among the finer spirits of the University
generally. He had the gift which enables a man, sitting perhaps after
dinner in a mixed society of his college contemporaries, to lead the way
imperceptibly from the casual subjects of the hour--the river, the dons,
the schools--to arguments "of great pith and moment," discussions that
search the moral and intellectual powers of the men concerned to the
utmost, without exciting distrust or any but an argumentative
opposition, Edward Hallin could do this without a pose, without a false
note, nay, rather by the natural force of a boyish intensity and
simplicity. To many a Trinity man in after life the memory of his slight
figure and fair head, of the eager slightly parted mouth, of the eyes
glowing with some inward vision, and of the gesture with which he would
spring up at some critical point to deliver himself, standing amid his
seated and often dissentient auditors, came back vivid and ineffaceable
as only youth can make the image of its prophets.

Upon Aldous Raeburn, Edward Hallin produced from the first a deep
impression. The interests to which Hallin's mind s