Foreign Missions, half diplomatic
in their character, to enquire into the condition and methods of Public
Instruction on the Continent. The ever-increasing popularity which
attended him on these Missions, and his excellent judgment in handling
Foreign Ministers and officials, might perhaps suggest the thought that
in renouncing diplomacy he renounced his true vocation. But the thought,
though natural, is superficial, and must give way to the absolute
conviction that he never could have known true happiness--never realized
his own ideal of life--without a wife, a family, and a home. And these
are luxuries which, as a rule, diplomatists cannot attain till

youth and bloom and this delightful world

have lost something of their freshness. In renouncing diplomacy he
secured, before he was twenty-nine, the chief boon of human life; but a
vague desire to enjoy that boon amid continental surroundings seems
constantly to have visited him. In 1851 he wrote to his wife: "We can
always look forward to retiring to Italy on L200 a year." In 1853 he
wrote to her again: "All this afternoon I have been haunted by a vision
of living with you at Berne, on a diplomatic appointment, and how
different that would be from this incessant grind in schools." And,
thirty years later, when he was approaching the end of his official
life, he wrote a friend: "I must go once more to America to see my
daughter, who is going to be married to an American, settled in her new
home. Then I 'feel like' retiring to Florence, and rarely moving from it
again."

But, in spite of all these dreams and longings, he seems to have known
that his lot was cast in England, and that England must be the sphere of
his main activities. "Year slips away after year, and one begins to find
that the Office has really had the main part of one's life, and that
little remains."

We, who are his disciples, habitually think of him as a poet, or a
critic, or an instructor in national righteousness and intelligence; as
a model of private virtue and of public spirit. We do not habitually
think of him as, in the narrow and technical sense, an Educator. And yet
a man who gives his life to a profession must be in a great measure
judged by what he accomplished in and through that profession, even
though in the first instance he "adopted it in order to marry."

Though not a born educator, not an educator by natural aptitude or
inclination, he made himself an educator by choice; an