were so

Confirmation, and, after being duly prepared, received the laying on of hands from the Bishop of Oxford. He had not been a month in the college before he won the Balliol scholarship, the greatest distinction open to to new-comers. Even in these early days his character stood so high, his ability and good sense were marked, and his habits were so serious and grave, that "at least a score of references" to the probability of his becoming Archbishop of Canterbury I might be culled from the correspondence of his early years, and from the recollections of his friends." It became a sort of recognised quiet pleasantry, a familiar touch. of dry humour, in the home circle. "On his first visit to London he came in one evening from a walk. 'Where have you been to, Archie?' he was asked. Walking through Lambeth,' he replied. Through Lambeth!' was the astonished answer; why, whatever possessed you to walk in Lambeth?' 'Well, I wanted to see how I shall like the place when I get there.' A few years later, after the burning of the Houses of Parliament, one of his friends wrote to him (October 21st, 1834): "I was seriously alarmed that I should have had to communicate to you the intelli

gence that your palace at Lambeth was burned to the ground. It gives me great pleasure,

however, to be able to state state that the only serious loss that you have incurred consists in the total destruction by fire of the Bishops' Bench in the House of Lords." And when Tait and some friends were on a reading-party in 1833 at Seaton, in Devonshire, a local Nonconformist minister, describing them each in a poem, wrote:

"And if Lavater rightly has defined,

From sign external, features of the mind,
He whom near yonder cliff we see recline
A mitred prelate may hereafter shine;

That youth who seems exploring nature's laws
An ermined judge may win deserved applause."

The one was Tait, the other Roundell Palmer.
In 1832 Tait was inexpressibly grieved by
the sudden death of his father, with whom he
had always been on terms of most affectionate
and intimate friendship. In 1833 he obtained
a first class in Classics, a few months after
Keble had begun the Tractarian movement
by his Assize Sermon, and returned to Edin-
burgh, where he attended the deathbed of the
faithful old nurse Betty
nurse Betty Morton. Grant,"
he wrote in his diary twelve years later, "that

no length of years may make me forget what I owe to Thee for having given me in infancy and childhood, when motherless and helpless, so good and kind a friend."

After taking pupils, travelling abroad with his friend Oakeley (afterwards the Roman Catholic Canon), and other congenial pursuits, he was elected Fellow of Balliol in 1834, the same day as William George Ward, the eccentric Tractarian, and subsequently Roman Catholic Professor. "Do I feel sufficiently the weighty responsibility which has devolved on me, to use my utmost exertions that the increased means placed in my hands may be made subservient in all things to God's glory, the good of my fellow-men and of my own soul? O God, do Thou enable me to keep these things more in view! . . . I have now not even the poor excuse of being forced to spend so much of my time in worldly concerns. Henceforward my worldly business, as well as my Christian duty, is God's service."

In 1835 he succeeded to Moberly's tutorship at Balliol. Of older pupils he had Arthur Stanley, James Lonsdale, and Wickens (afterwards Vice-Chancellor); of younger, Waldegrave (afterwards Bishop of Carlisle), Goulburn

(afterwards Dean of Norwich), Lake (Dean of Durham), Sir Benjamin Brodie, Jowett, and Hugh Pearson (Canon of Windsor).

On Trinity Sunday 1836 he was ordained deacon by Bishop Bagot, of Oxford, the sermon being preached by his beloved friend Oakeley. "To-morrow will see me an ordained minister of Christ, bound to labour in season and out of season for the good of souls. O God, give me strength, by Thy grace, never for one instant to lose sight of my spiritual duties to my pupils! Some of them are more fitted to teach me in heavenly things than I to teach them. I must live more a life of

prayer.

I must pray for them.... I rejoice in the prospect that to-morrow I shall be authorised, bound, to teach and exhort. I trust there is no presumption in saying that my dedication to the ministry is prompted by the Holy Ghost. O God, give me a greater measure of Thy Spirit ; enable me to labour in Thy service, giving myself wholly to it!" For five years he was also the earnest and devoted curate of Baldon, five miles from Oxford.

In 1838 his friends tried much to persuade him to stand first for the Chair of Moral Philosophy, and then for that of Greek, at the

University of Glasgow. Many Many Episcopalians had held such professorships; all that was required of them was subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Though strongly pressed, Tait remained firm, and withdrew from the contest.

In 1839 he spent three months at the University of Bonn, becoming intimately acquainted with the German language, literature, and professors. About this time he began to take a spiritual charge of the college servants -an effort thus recorded: "I have spent much. of this day in prayer, though I fear it has come too little from the heart. I have begun to-day a most important work in the teaching of the boys amongst the college servants. God, send Thy blessing on this endeavour. Above all, lead my own heart right, or how can I teach others? Lord, I thank Thee that Thou hast smoothed the way for carrying out this plan for the college servants. Grant Thy Spirit to teacher and taught, that it may not all end in dead formality."

Principal Shairp thus describes his power as a college tutor: "He was by far the most influential of the then Balliol tutors. . He was the Master's Prime Minister, on whom he