THE LATE MR. EVELYN ABBOTT.
rro TEE EDITOR OP TEE " SPECTATOR." I Sin.—English scholarship and the teaching of classical antiquity at Oxford have experienced a very distinct loss in the death of Dr. Evelyn Abbott. But even more than a public loss is it a personal bereavement to his College and his many friend,. Balliol has had during the last thirty years, as she had in the thirty years before, the services of many able and devoted sons. Her success has been due quite as much to their chivalrous and selfless devotion as to their high ability. Henry Smith,-T. H. Green, Arnold Toynbee, R. L. Nettleship, Sir John Conroy,—these have been among Jowetes 6'10 henchmen, and ably they seconded him. But none was more devoted or faithful to the College than the brave, diligent student and tutor who served her so long from what might have seemed, in Heine's phrase, a " mattress grave." A fine athlete in his undergraduate days, as well as a scholar, tin. accountably paralysed in his lower limbs just as he took his degree, and reduced literally to the condition of Browning's grammarian, Abbott, like Fawcett, seems to have resolved that "it should make no difference." Dr. Percival at Clifton and Mr. Jowett at 13alliol gave him the opportunity ; he lived his life, he made a name as a scholar, he read, he wrote, he taught,. he examined, he was the genial friend and helper of many generations of undergraduates, who will remember his all over the Empire. Above all, he taught one lesson, learned in the hardest school, leiden ohne zu klagen (to suffer without complaining). Such men do more than they know, and their pupils feel for them more than they can express.—I am, Sir,
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