Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/335

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1857-1862 ^75 surrounded by cloisters, and there were four dormitories for the boys. The college stands on comparatively high ground, and is on the Sussex weald, commanding a noble prospect of the South Downs ; right in front was Danny Beacon, a height crowned by a large prehistoric camp, to which on Ascension Day the choir mounted and therefrom sang a Latin hymn. This was an institution of Dr. Lowe, the first head master, and I believe that he left a bequest so that the ceremony might never be discontinued. At Hurst I saw and conversed with John Keble, author of The Christian Year. Like the rest of the old Oriel Tractarians, he habitually wore a swallow-tailed coat, high gills and a big white tie. He was a singularly plain man, and his somewhat uncouth features seemed to me to find a reflex in his poetry, to which I never could acquire a liking, though it was a favourite book with my mother, and in after times with my dear wife. He had a pleasant voice and an attractive manner ; was extremely humble-minded and self-effacing. That appears to me to be a distinctive trait of the High Churchman, whereas self-conscious-ness is written in every line of the face and curve of the body of the Evangelical, and this occasionally exaggerated to offensive-ness in the Dissenting minister. A man of a very different type who visited Hurst was Mark Pattison of Lincoln College, Oxford, a man with a most discontented, soured look. He struck me as one who never smiled, and whom a hearty laugh would shake to pieces as an earthquake shattered Lisbon. He wandered about the cloisters and paced the terrace, with his head down, as if in search of beetles and earthworms. I did not see him look straight before him, or ever turn his eyes towards the blue sky, not even when there were clouds in it. The boys thought he was a haunted man, and wondered what crime he had committed for which a ghost pursued him. Some of his sermons were published in 1885, and exhibit, except in the concluding address on All Saints, an absence of anything like Christianity as a rule of life, and a source of hope. In his Memoirs he mentions how that he preached on the subject of an accidental drowning of one of the students of Lincoln, and, " I endeavoured to enforce the solemn reflections which such an event in a college gives rise to." If we look at the sermon, we