interpreters of Aristotle and the teachers of moral philosophy had he continued his career at Oxford. Or had he come straight from Oxford to a professorship in a Scottish university, and in that position become familiar with the peculiarities of Scottish education before he was called to the Principalship, he would have gained an experience which would have qualified him better, perhaps, than any other man, to initiate and direct the reform of our schools and universities. But the greater distinction as a writer, and the special experience which would have made the problems of our Scottish educational system more immediately intelligible to him, would have been gained with the loss of that larger experience and discipline which developed all his powers both of thought and action. By one who knew him both in the earlier and the latest stage in his career, the cultivated Oxford man, who from the years 1845 to 1859 made himself a name in scholarship and philosophy, and attached to himself so many friends, can be recognised as the same in his essential qualities and gifts with the man who, in after-life, obtained so great a hold over all those with whom he acted, – gaining their confidence by his loyalty to the cause in which they were jointly interested, attaching them to himself by his genial and cordial intercourse with them, and impressing their imagination with a sense of reserved power, – as of one capable of fulfilling larger duties in the sphere of government and administration, had they come in his way, and of distinction, as of one who could have taken his place easily and naturally among the great in the sphere both of thought and action.
A short sketch of his career may be not unwelcome at a time when the thought of his loss is still vivid among old college friends and more recent colleagues, and his familiar figure is missed by many, with a sense of pain, in the streets of Edinburgh. By birth he belonged, on the father's side, to an old Scottish family, the Grants of Dalvey on Speyside. The family estate had been sold by his grandfather, and the fortune invested in West India property; and from that time the connection of the family with Scotland had ceased. His uncle, Sir Alexander Grant, the sixth Baronet, was well known in political circles and in London society, had been Chairman of Committee in the House of Commons, and was a prominent member of the Carlton Club. His mother was of mixed French and Scottish extraction, and was the daughter of a planter in the Danish West Indian island of Santa Cruz. It is not perhaps fanciful to trace some of the characteristics which marked him through life to his family history. When he first came up from school to Oxford, men remarked under the unaffected geniality of his manners something of an old-fashioned courtesy and distinction, which has been noticed as characteristic of old Scottish families, and has been supposed to be a survival of the historical connection between France and Scotland. His remarkable freedom from prejudice and partisanship, and the facility with which he adapted himself to new circumstances and new people, come more naturally to a Scotchman by descent, born and educated out of Scotland, than either to a home-bred Scot or a home-bred Englishman. Though no man could have had less of the assumption which the consciousness of good birth sometimes imparts to men of in-
