contrasted with the easy ways of society at Oxford, where men who wish to meet without inconvenience or interruption to the regular course of their occupations can do so almost daily, in the college halls or common rooms, in country walks, or in transacting the public business of the University. After six months' trial of the law, during which he became very dissatisfied with himself, and more or less dissatisfied with everything about him, he wisely gave up a useless and irritating struggle against the natural bent of his genius; and resigning the Eldon Scholarship, he returned, with a sense of extreme relief and thankfulness, to the quiet of his rooms in University College.

During his stay in London he formed a connection with the Morning Chronicle, and became for a time a regular contributor to that journal. But, notwithstanding all his fluency in writing, it may be doubtful whether he would ever have developed the somewhat peculiar talent which is required for the daily production of first-rate leading articles. He never could write his best except when he wrote from strong conviction, or, at least, when he wrote upon matters which interested him deeply, and which had been present to his mind long enough for him to know what attitude he could conscientiously take up with regard to them. But the journalist has sometimes to write at a few hours' notice on a subject with which, to say the least, he is only superficially acquainted, and has to advocate a view which is indicated to him in advance by party or editorial exigencies, and which may not be the same as that which the facts, when he begins to examine them, would of themselves have suggested to his mind. These difficulties were keenly felt by Conington, and when it fell to his lot to do one of the roughand-ready pieces of work which are necessary to the successful conducting of a newspaper, there was a sort of timidity in the execution of his task, a conscientious balancing of the two sides of the question, and a hesitation in pressing his point, which was very unlike the vigorous way in which he could lay about him when writing upon questions with regard to which his mind.

was made up. The articles in the Morning Chronicle of 1849-50 which relate to University Reform, a topic then attracting much attention in the Liberal press, are chiefly from his hand; and these certainly will not be found to exhibit any indecision of purpose or any want of incisive expression.

Before he went to London he had already (in 1848) edited the Agamemnon of Eschylus, with English notes, and an interleaved translation into English verse. With this, his first effort, both as a translator and editor of a classic author, he was never thoroughly satisfied, even at the time of its publication; and later, when he had to consider the advisability of republishing it, he determined not to do so, saying that he should have to rewrite the whole commentary and to suppress the translation altogether. Of the translation he probably judged too hardly, for though as a whole it is inharmonious, and is blemished here and there with harsh and even infelicitous renderings, it is not wanting in vigour nor in poetic feeling, while it hardly needs to be said that it is scholarlike and accurate. After his return to Oxford Eschylus continued to be his favourite. He knew the whole of the seven plays by heart, and lavished time and thought upon the criticism and explanation of their text. His 'Choephoroe' appeared in 1857, and is one of the best editions of that play in existence, contributing only a little, it is true, to the settlement of the text, but very much to its right interpretation. He had also collected the materials (chiefly, however, storing them in his memory) for a similar edition of the 'Supplices.' But he was prevented from carrying out this design, in the first instance, by his undertaking in conjunction with Mr. Goldwin Smith to edit Virgil, and afterwards by his appointment to the chair of Latin. From a conscientious motive, which it is difficult not to think overstrained, he was unwilling after he became Professor of Latin to devote any considerable portion of his time to Greek, and when pressed, as he often was, to prepare his edition of the 'Supplices' for publication, he would always say that he must let

it wait until he had done what he could with Latin. The edition of Virgil was begun in 1852, and the first volume, containing the Eclogues and Georgics, was published in 1858. The greater part of the work had to be done alone, as Mr. Goldwin Smith, on becoming secretary to the Oxford University Commission, was obliged to retire from the joint editorship. The transition from the absorbing study of Eschylus to that of Virgil was an abrupt one, as it would be difficult to find two poets whose merits and imperfections are more absolutely unlike. Thus, when he began working on Virgil he was not indisposed to sympathise with much of the depreciatory criticism of which that poet has been the object during the present century. Traces of this want of admiration are by no means unfrequent in his earlier notes, though even these are much softened down from what they were in their first rough drafts. But to all lovers of Virgil it is pleasant to see how the beauties of the poet, though they grew upon him only gradually, proved irresistible in the end; and if he was guilty, when comparatively a beginner, of finding a certain clumsiness in the construction of the first Eclogue, he made ample amends by the genuine and hearty admiration which he afterwards bestowed upon other writings of its author. The lecture On the style of Lucretius and Catullus as compared with that of the poets of the Augustan age,' which is printed in this volume, expresses the judgment at which he finally arrived, and contains some fine criticism of the minuter details of Virgil's consummate art, as well as an earnest vindication of his claim to genuine originality.

The election to the Professorship of Latin took place in 1854. The Chair was a new one in the University, having just been founded by Corpus Christi College to carry out a provision in the statutes of their founder, which had been allowed to fall into abeyance during the long torpor which had crept over the professorial system in Oxford. As Conington was opposed by more than one distinguished competitor, whose merits he most

fully recognised, and as he was himself better known as a Greek than as a Latin scholar, he did not expect a favourable result with any great confidence, and his anxiety was in proportion to his uncertainty. His success gave him all the external advantages that he desired in life; and, if in the few preceding years his mind had been sometimes disturbed by an under-current of restlessness and discontent, these feelings passed away at once and for ever.

But this was not the only change that his friends observed in him at this time. During the Long Vacation, which intervened between his election to the Professorship and his entrance upon the discharge of its duties, he passed through a mental conflict which left a deep and permanent impression upon his character, and which, even in this brief memoir, it would be inconsistent with truthfulness to leave unmentioned. The liveliness and sincerity of the religious impressions of his childhood have been already noticed; and these impressions had at no subsequent time faded from his mind. At Rugby they had grown with his growth, and had been widened as well as deepened by the teaching and the example of Dr. Arnold, to whom the discharge of every duty, however secular, seemed a direct religious service, and who had the gift of communicating something of this sacred earnestness to those immediately around him. At Oxford, in a larger world, Conington was exposed, as his father had anticipated, to influences of a more varied and unsettling kind. It would have been strange if, with his powers of sympathy, and with his unfeigned reverence for every manifestation of intellectual or moral greatness, he could have remained wholly unaffected by either of the two tendencies of thought which divided the Oxford of his day between them, although neither of them were in unison with the early teachings of his home, or perhaps with his own most deeply-rooted convictions. As an undergraduate he became a disciple, though by no means an advanced one, of the Oxford high church theology, combining it, as many others have done, with a sort of political radicalism,

which with him was never very extreme, though it sufficed to obtain for him, at least with the young Tories of the Union, the reputation of being a very dangerous and revolutionary character. But, living as he did in a society which might have taken for its adage the words of Ecclesiastes, Mundum tradidit disputationi eorum, and which assuredly believed that animated conversational discussions are as effectual for the discovery of truth as they unquestionably are for the sharpening of the wit, he gradually formed the habit of submitting the varying opinions of men on religious questions, as on all other subjects of human interest, to a keen intellectual criticism; and, though it is likely that he never adopted any conclusions of a rationalistic kind, he acquired a distaste for all dogmatic definiteness, and a warm sympathy with the spirit of free enquiry in theology. But at the time at which he had now arrived, a change passed over the tenor of his thoughts in relation to these subjects-a change, which was as sudden as it was complete and enduring. As he described it himself, a sense of the reality of eternal things was instantaneously borne in upon him, while he was engaged in one of his ordinary occupations. For some weeks his mind was agitated and unstrung by this overwhelming consciousness of the immediate presence of the terrors of the unseen world. He was unable to take any interest in, or even to give any sustained attention to, any subject not directly affecting the momentous questions which engaged his thoughts. He would not even read the New Testament in Greek, apparently because the very language suggested associations which for the time had become repugnant to him. When he emerged from this state of depression, it was with the fixed determination to make the obligations of religion, as he had learned them in his childhood, the sole governing principle of his life; and to this determination he consistently adhered. It was some little time before his mind completely recovered its calmness and energy, and before a settled and cheerful piety replaced the gloom which had for a while overshadowed him.