it can give no fresh draught to another mind; it is drinking out of a pond, instead of from a spring. And whatever you read tends generally to your own increase of power, and will be felt by you in a hundred ways hereafter.

near.

*

CXCIX. TO J. P. GELL, ESQ.

(On the death of his brother, Charles Gell.)

Rugby, April 5, 1839.

Your letter ought not to grieve me, but it was a shock for which I was not prepared, as I had not dreamed that your brother's departure was so The thoughts of him will be amongst the most delightful of all my thoughts of Rugby pupils; so amiable and so promising here, and so early called to his rest and glory. I do feel more and more for my pupils, and for my children also, that I can readily and thankfully see them called away, when they are to all human appearance assuredly called home. This is a lesson which advancing years impress very strongly. We can then better tell how little are those earthly things of which early death deprives us, and how fearful is the risk of this world's struggle May God bless us through His Son, and make us to come at last, be it sooner or later, out of this struggle conquerors.

CC. TO THE UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE.

July 1, 1839.

Nothing can be more proper than that the Head Master or Principal of the proposed School should be subject to the control of the Governor, or of the Bishop, should there be one in the colony. I am only anxious to understand clearly whether he is to be in any degree under the control of any local Board, whether lay or clerical; because, if he were, I could not conscientiously recommend him to take an office which I am sure he would shortly find himself obliged to abandon. Uniform experience shows, I think, so clearly the mischief of subjecting schools to the ignorance and party feelings of persons wholly unacquainted with the theory and practice of education, that I feel it absolutely necessary to understand fully the intentions of the Government on this question.

CCI. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE.

Rugby, May 8, 1839.

[After speaking of a decision respecting the Foundationers in Rugby School.] The world will not know that it makes no earthly difference to me in a pecuniary point of view, whether a boy is in the lower school or the upper; and that if I had discouraged the lower school, and especially the Foundationers, who do not interfere with the number of boarders, I should have been quarrelling with my own bread and butter. Lord Langdale did not understand the difference which I had always made between Non-foundationers and Foundationers, as I have indeed always advised people not to send their sons as boarders under twelve, but have never applied the same advice to Foundationers living under their parents' roof. But it is so old a charge against masters of Foundation Schools, that they discourage the Foundationers, in order to have boarders who pay them better, that I dare say Lord Langdale and half the world will believe that I have been acting on this principle; and my old friends of the Tory newspapers are quite likely to gibe at me as liking a little jobbing in my own particular

case, as well as other pretended Reformers. Even you, perhaps, do not know that I receive precisely as much money for every Foundationer, if he be only a little boy in the first form, as I do for any Non-foundationer at the head of the school; so that I have a direct interest-since all men are supposed to act from interest-in increasing the number of Foundationers, and no earthly interest or object in diminishing them. I think you will not wonder at my being a little sensitive on the present occasion, for a judge's decision is a very different thing from an article in a common newspaper; and as I believe that nothing of the latter sort has ever disturbed my equanimity, so I should not wish to regard the former lightly. So I should very much like to hear from you what you think is to be done,-if any thing. After all, I could laugh heartily at the notion of my being suspected of a little snug corruption, after having preached Reform all my life.

CCII. TO SIR T. S. PASLEY, BART.

Rugby, May 10, 1839.

Your absence will be a sad blank in our Westmoreland visits, if we are still allowed to continue them. But seven years is a long term for human life, and so long have we been permitted to go down summer and winter, and return with all our family entire and in good health; so that I cannot but fancy that something or other may happen to break this happy uniformity of our lives.

The state of public affairs is not inviting, and I rejoice that we take in no daily paper. It is more painful than enough to read of evils which one can neither cure nor palliate. The real evil which lies at the bottom of the Chartist agitation, is, I believe, too deep for any human remedy, unless the nation were possessed with a spirit of wisdom and of goodness, such as I fear will never be granted to us after we have for so many centuries neglected the means which we have had. So far from finding it hard to believe that repentance can never be too late, my only wonder is that it should ever be otherwise than too late, so instantaneous and so lasting are the consequences of any evil once committed. I find it very hard to hinder my sense of this from quite oppressing me and making me forget the many blessings of my own domestic condition. But perhaps it comes from my fondness for History, that political things have as great a reality to my mind, as things of private life, and the life of a nation becomes distinct as that of an individual. We are going to have a confirmation here, by the Bishop of Worcester, next month in the chapel, as I wished to have one every two years at least, for otherwise many of the boys go abroad and are never confirmed at all. And I think that we shall have a third painted window up in the chapel, before the holidays.

CCIII. TO ARCHDEACON HARE.

Fox How, June 21, 1839.

I am sure that you will have sympathized with me in the delight which I have felt in reading Niebuhr's Letters; that letter in particular to a Young Student in Philology, appears to me invaluable. I think that you and Thirlwall have much to answer for in not having yet completed your translation of the third volume of the History. It is only when that volume shall have become generally known, that English readers will learn to appreciate Niebuhr's excellence as a narrator. At present I am continually provoked by hearing people say, that he indeed prepared excellent materials for an historian, but that he did not himself write History.

I am obliged to superintend a new edition of my Thucydides, which interferes rather with the progress of my History. And the first volume of Thucydides is so full of errors, both of omission and commission, that to revise it is a work of no little labour.

You would rejoice in the good that Lee is doing at Birmingham; I do not think that there is, in all England, a man more exactly in his place than he is now.

CCIV. TO AN OLD PUPIL. (E.)

Fox How, June 22, 1839.

I was much obliged to you for your last kind letter, and I would have answered it immediately had it not arrived just at our most busy time, at the close of the summer half-year. I do not wonder at your interest about the friend whom you speak of, and should be very glad to be of any assistance to you in the matter. Priestley's statements, as you probably know, were answered by Horsley, and I believe sufficiently answered; but neither of the controversialists was very profound, or, as I should fear, very fair; and but little real benefit can be derived from the works of either. Priestley's arguments now would be repeated nowhere, I suppose, but in England, and in England only amongst a sect so destitute of theological and critical learning as the Unitarians. It goes on two assumptions: first, that the Christian Church of Jerusalem held Unitarian opinions; and secondly, that the Church of Jerusalem was the standard by which the tenets of the other churches were to be measured. Now the second of these assumptions is clearly wrong, and the first is probably so; but we have very small evidence as to the opinions of the Church of Jerusalem, and so a dispute may be maintained for ever on that point, by those who would confine their attention to it, and who do not see that the real stress of the question lies elsewhere. But the Epistles of Ignatius are a decided proof that neither he nor the Churches of Asia were Unitarian; and his language is the more to be valued, because it is evidently not controversial, nor does he ever dream of dwelling on Christ's Divinity as a disputed point, but as a thing taken by all Christians for granted. I do not understand, however, how an Unitarian can consistently transfer the argument from the Scripture to the opinion of the early Church. As he rejects the authority of the Church, without scruple, where it is clearly to be ascertained, and where it speaks the opinions of Christians of all parts of the world, through more than seventeen centuries, it is idle to refer to the single Church of Jerusalem during a period of twenty or thirty years, unless he can show that that Church was infallible, and its decisions of equal weight with those of the Scripture. If he says that St. Paul and St. John corrupted the purity of the true Gospel, which was kept only by St. James and the Church of Jerusalem,-that no doubt would be an intelligible argument; but to accept St. Paul and St. John as inspired Apostles, and then to plead the opinions of the Church of Jerusalem against them, is an absurdity. And as for the Unitarian interpretations of St. Paul and St. John, they are really such monstrosities of extravagance, that to any one used to the critical study of the ancient writers, they appear too bad to have been ever maintained in earnest. And thus, wherever Unitarianism has existed, together with any knowledge of criticism or philology, as in Germany, it has at once assumed that the Apostles were not infallible, and that they overrated the dignity of Christ's Person. So impossible is it to doubt what St. John meant in so many passages of his Gospel, and what St. Paul meant in so many passages of his Epistles. It gives me the greatest pleasure to find that you still enjoy your situation, and that being the case, you are likely, I think, to find it more and more agreeable, the longer you hold it.

CCV. TO REV. G. CORNISH.

Fox How, July 6, 1839.

As I believe that the English universities are the best places in the world for those who can profit by them, so I think for the idle and self-indulgent they are about the very worst, and I would far rather send a boy to Van Diemen's Land, where he must work for his bread, than send him to Oxford to live in luxury, without any desire in his mind to avail himself of his advantages. Childishness in boys, even of good abilities, seems to me to be a growing fault, and I do not know to what to ascribe' it, except to the great number of exciting books of amusement, like Pickwick and Nickleby, Bentley's Magazine, &c. &c. These completely satisfy all the intellectual appetite of a boy, which is rarely very voracious, and leave him totally palled, not only for his regular work, which I could well excuse in comparison, but for good literature of all sorts, even for History and for Poetry.

I went up to Oxford to the Commemoration, for the first time for twentyone years, to see Wordsworth and Bunsen receive their degrees; and to me, remembering how old Coleridge inoculated a little knot of us with the love of Wordsworth, when his name was in general a by-word, it was striking to witness the thunders of applause, repeated over and over again, with which he was greeted in the theatre by Under-graduates and Masters of Arts alike.

CCVI. TO CHEVALIER BUNSEN.

Rugby, August 23, 1839.

I intend this letter to reach you on the 25th of August, a day which has a double claim on my remembrance; for it is my little Susy's birthday also, and I wish it to convey to you, though most inadequately, my congratulation to Mrs. Bunsen and all your family on the return of that day, and my earnest wishes for all happiness for you and for them; and, so far as we may wish in such matters, my earnest desire that you may be long spared to your friends, your family, your country, and above all to Christ's Holy Catholic Church, in whose cause I know you are ever labouring, and which at this hour needs the utmost service of all her true members, amidst such various dangers as now threaten her from within and from without. I am glad to think that this one birthday more you will pass in England.

We shall see you and all your family, I confidently trust, ere very long. Meanwhile you will be glad to hear that and I enjoyed our journey greatly, and, although we saw but little of Italy, yet that the South of France even surpassed our expectations, and the physical benefit to my health and strength was as complete as I could desire. Arles interested me exceedingly; it was striking to see the Amphitheatre and Theatre so close to each other, and the two marble pillars still standing in the proscenium of the theatre, reminded me of the Forum at Rome. I was also much struck with the deserted Port of Frejus, and the mole and entrance tower of the old harbour, rising now out of a plain of grass. The famous plain of stones or plain of Crau, was very interesting, for it lies now in precisely the same state as it was 2300 years ago, or more, when it was made the scene of one of the adventures of Hercules; and the remarkably Spanish character of the town, population, and neighbourhood of Salon, between Arles and Aix, was something quite new to me. In Italy we only went from Nice to Turin, by the Col di Tenda, and certainly in my recollections of this year's tour, all images of beauty and interest are connected with France, rather than with Italy. The intense drought had spoiled every thing, and the main

1 See Sermons, vol. iv. pp. 39-41.

Alps themselves, as seen in a perfectly clear morning from the neighbourhood of Turin, exhibited scarcely more than patches of snow on their summits; the effect of a long range of snowy summits was completely gone. Still I had a great delight in setting foot once more, if it was but in a mere corner of Italy; sights which I had half forgotten have taken again a fresh place in my memory; the style of the buildings-the "congesta manu præruptis oppida saxis"—the cultivation of the valleys-the splendour of the churches-nay, the very roguery and lying of the people, and their marvellous ignorance-rose up before me again as something which I did not wish to lose altogether out of my memory.

I paid a long visit to Letronne at Paris, and Peyrou at Turin. Both were very civil and agreeable, and gave me several of their works. Peyrou had received many letters from Niebuhr, which he showed to me with seeming pleasure-but he had never seen him. It was sad to me to find that he too had a lively sense of the grievous ignorance of English writers on points of philology. He mentioned to me with dismay, and read to me extracts from a Coptic dictionary lately published, proh pudor! at Oxford, which I had never seen, or even heard of the writer's name, nor do I remember it nowbut it was worthy to rank with Sir W. Betham's extravagances about the Keltic languages. I tried hard at Provence to find a Provençal Grammar, but I could not succeed, and they told me there was no such thing; they only showed me a grammar for teaching French to Provençals, whch they wanted to persuade me was all the same thing. It seems that the Provençal language is less fortunate than the Welsh, in having wealthy and educated persons desirous of encouraging it. I could not find that it was at all used now as a written language, although it seemed to me to be as distinct from French as Italian is.

. [After questions relating to Sillig's Edition of Pliny.] I have read your speech at Oxford, and admire your indefatigable exertions to see and hear every thing in England. But I feel the state of public affairs so deeply that I cannot bear either to read, or hear, or speak, or write about them. Only I would commend them to God's care and deliverance, if the judgment is not now as surely fixed as that of Babylon.

CCVII. TO MR. JUSTICE COLERIDGE.

Rugby, September 25, 1839.

I do not know where this letter may find you, but I hope that it may be at Ottery; and that you may be enjoying to the full your rest from work, and the society of your family, and the actual beauty and the old recollections of your home. We have been at work now nearly seven weeks, so that the holidays live but in remote memory, and I am very far from wishing them to come again very speedily; for they imply that a half year is gone, and there is so much that I would fain do, that I cannot wish time to pass away very quickly. The South of France put me into the best bodily condition in which I can almost ever remember to have been; and happily the effect of such a medicine does not immediately evaporate; it really seems to wind up the machine for three or four months.

The Roman remains at Arles, the papal remains at Avignon, and the Spanish-like character of the country between Arles and Aix were exceedingly interesting. I thought of old days when I used to read Southey's raptures about Spain and Spaniards as I looked out on the street at Salon, where a fountain was playing under a grove of plane trees, and the population were all in felt hats, grave and quiet, and their Provençal language sounding much more like Spanish than French. Then we had the open heaths covered with the dwarf ilex and Roman pine, and the rocks actually breathing fragrance from the number of their aromatic plants.