well known and so widely honored among a "present
posterity" in America, for his works. He read the chapter through,--with
a running commentary at first,--blocking out, as it were, his ground
notion of it. This was the first _ebauche_ of his criticism; but you
felt after its details without quite finding them. In a word, the
impression was precisely the uneasy impression you feel after the first
reading of one of his sermons or lectures,--that there is a very grand
general conception, but that you do not see how it is going to "fay in"
in its respective parts. One of the students intimated some such doubt
regarding some of the opening verses,--and there at once appeared enough
to show how frank was the relation, in that class at least, between the
teacher and the pupils. Then began the real work and the real joy of the
evening. Then on the background he had washed in before he began to put
in his middle-distance, and at last his foreground, and, last of all,
to light up the whole by a set of flashes, which he had reserved,
unconsciously, to the close. He dropped his forehead on his hand, worked
it nervously with his fingers, as if he were resolved that what was
within should serve him, went over the whole chapter in much more detail
a second time, held us all charged with his electricity, so that we
threw in this, that, or another question or difficulty,--till he fell
back yet a third time, and again went through it, weaving the whole
together, and making part illustrate part under the light of the comment
and illumination which it had received before,--and so, when we read
it with him for the fourth and last time, it was no longer a string
of beads,--a set of separate verses,--Jewish, antiquated, and
fragmentary,--but one vivid illustration of the "peace which passeth all
understanding" into which the Christian man may enter.

With this fortunate illustration and exposition of the worth and work of
the Working-Men's College my connection with it closed. It seems to me a
beautiful monument of the love and energy of its founder. Perhaps we are
all best known through our friends, or, as the proverb says, "by the
company we keep." Let the reader know Mr. Maurice, then, by remembering
that he is the godfather of Tennyson's son,--

"Come, when no graver cares annoy,
Godfather, come and see your boy,"--

that Charles Kingsley has a Frederic Maurice among his children,--and
that Thomas Hughes has a Maurice also. The las