The serious and rapid impairment of our beloved President’s health, which was obvious to those who heard his Address in January last, prepared in some measure his friends for his untimely end. Only in some measure, for it seemed a thing incredible that a man of such splendid physique, and of such zest in life as lusty vigour imparts, would not pass to his grave full of years and honours. Dis aliter visum. The honours are his; the years are denied him; he has died at the premature age of fifty-four, to the impoverishment of the world’s stock of kindliness and learning.
An only son, whose mother survives him, his school life at Rugby was followed by matriculation as a non-collegiate at Oxford, where he was placed first-class in Law and Modern History. He became successively Law Lecturer, Tutor, and Student of Christ Church; Oriel gave him a Fellowship; Glasgow University made him LL.D., and the Clarendon Press welcomed him as one of its most zealous and capable delegates. In 1894, twenty years after he had been called to the Bar by the Middle Temple, he accepted, at the call of Lord Rosebery, the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford, which had been rendered vacant by the death of Mr. Froude. The “outward and visible” results of this appointment are scanty. A slender treatise or two on Early English History, a goodly number of articles in Social England, in the Encyclopædia Britannica, and the English Historical Review and a heap of reviews in the Manchester Guardian and other high-class newspapers, fill the list. But, in collaboration with Professor Vigfússon, whose death the big, tender-hearted comrade never ceased to mourn, he gave us, out of the large store of his favourite study, Scandinavian history, the wonderful apparatus of
