LIFE AND LETTERS OF PROFESSOR HORT. * FENTON HORT was

an Irishman with a difference. He was the great-grandson of an Archbishop of Tnam ; his great- grandmother was a Fitzmaurice, and his grandmother a Butler ; and he was born in Dublin. But the Archbishop had migrated to Ireland in 1709, and belonged by origin to Somersetshire. Fenton Horns mother was English (not " descended," surely, from Dean Colet); so that, on the whole,

• We and Lettere of Amgen John Anthony Hort. IAD.. to. By his Son, Arthur Benton Hort. 2 vols. London : Macmillan and Co. 1598.

the two countries may divide the honour of his parentage.

At the age of ten Fenton Hort was beginning to read " Homer and Xenophon's Anabasis with Horace or Virgil and Cicero ;" a year later Mr. Buckland of Laleham (where he had succeeded Arnold in 1828) predicted that he would become a first-rate scholar. At thirteen he went to Rugby, entering along with H. J. S. Smith, the Oxford Crichton, and W. H. Waddington, most distinguished of Anglo-Frenchmen. Promoted to the sixth at as early an age as was possible, he astonished his schoolfellows by his unfailing knowledge. One contemporary describes him as " snapping up " all the questions as they came round; another—but this refers to an earlier stage in his career—as referred to by his teacher "for what no one else could answer." The teacher was Bonamy Price. It seems a duty to record of a man who was scarcely as much appreciated as he deserved his pupil's testi- mony, " To him I owe all scholarship and New Testament criticism." This was written nearly thirty years afterwards, and Hort was one who always weighed his words. The boy's letters during his school life are remarkable for two characteristics, the variety of his intellectual interests and the strength of his religions convictions. The letter, written a few days before his eighteenth birthday, in which he sets before his father and mother the reasons of his choice of the Christian Ministry as his life's work, is most impressive. He speaks in it of opening "a sealed paper" written five years before on the same subject. Here is, indeed, the note of a most serious teacher, which, however, seems never to have shown itself in any of the narrowness and moroseness which are sometimes found in early piety.

Chap. iii. of the first volume, entitled "Cambridge; Undergraduate Life," is one of the most remarkable pieces of biography—told, it should be said, almost wholly in letters, and, of course, indirectly—that we have ever seen. The outward results were sufficiently notable. He gained honours in four Triposes. In the Mathematical, it is true, he was but a Junior Optime, but then an attack of scarlet-fever prevented him from doing more than the "Three Days." In the Classical Tripos he was third in the First Class, a place that disappointed his friends; in the Moral Sciences fourth in the First Class, with the Moral Philosophy prize; in the Natural Sciences second in the First Class, with the note, "Distinguished in Pbysiology and Botany." But these facts represent what he was most inadequately. Most men at this time of their life are so busy in acquiring that they have not much power left for thinking. It was not so- with Hort. His letters show a many-sided mind actively at work, wonderfully versatile, but as that word has a suspicion of superficiality about it, singularly clear and sane in its judgments. We may take a letter dated "Trinity Sunday [May 26th], 1850," as a fair sample of the whole. The writer begins by criticising the sing- ing of Catherine Hayes—" she spun out the notes in a manner most unpathetio and unballad-like," and the piano - playing of Kate Loder. Then come notices of Carlyle's Latter-Day Pamphlets and J. S. Mill, and of Wordsworth's death. A little bit of geology is interjected. He has a sort of link with his correspondent, John Ellerton, because he has been at one end of the "long belt of Lower Green Sand" while his friend lives at the other. Coleridge F. Newman, G. Sand, appear, and then the rest of the letter is given to F. D. Maurice and the Socialism of the day. Hort had received an invitation to breakfast with Maurice, and goes up with Alexander Macmillan—then in business at Cambridge—on the Sunday before. Here is a little picture of Lincoln's Inn Chapel

"We got in the pew diagonally furthest from Maurice, and he was already in his desk. It was a dark afternoon, and the stained glass was dim, and I would hardly believe that that was the Maurice of the portrait. His reading of the service did not seem to me nearly so marked and varied as you described and Blunt confirmed, but it was wonderfully beautiful; not a particle of effect or mouthing, but the calmest, solemnest, yet never monotonous, prayer. The anthem was a long, dreary anthology of scraps from old English composers; but it was curious to watch his face looking out into the chapel, with the dark hollows of his deep-set eyes strongly contrasted with the rest of his face in the sort of twilight. His text was 1 John i. 8, 9.

Such a sermon in every respect I never heard ; his quiet, deep voice, piercing you so softly and firmly through and through, never pausing or relaxing in its strain of elo- quence, every syllable, as it were, weighted with the energy and might of his whole soul (and what a soul !), kept me Crouched in a kind of spell, such as I could not have con- ceived."

And here is the breakfast :— "The next (rainy) morning we were at Maurice's before nine; he received me most kindly, and apologized that he had brought me unawares but unintentionally into a Socialist breakfast ; a .committee had to meet, and his breakfast-table was most speedy and convenient. Accordingly I was introduced to Ludlow and one or two others (Hughes, a most glorious, free, hearty fellow Macmillan had introduced to me after chapel on Sunday). Lud- low, with his quiet, earnest, strong, gentle manner, pleased me much. Among the others were Vansittart Neale, who supplies most of the cash (he is cousin to Vansittart, who is now among the promoters, but was that day at Cambridge), and Chevallier, a French political economist. They are coming out with a book on the subject likely to be very strong, and to contain an honest attack on property, root and branch. Manrice's evanescent smiles and occasional quiet, overwhelming observations, the force of which they did not in the least perceive, amused me much. I had not much conversation with him then, but in his presence everything was delight."

Hort, we see elsewhere, had thought a good deal about Socialism, and notwithstanding his admiration of the leaders of the " Christian " variety of it, saw quite clearly that it was

illogical and impossible. Of the expulsion of Maurice from King's College there are some interesting notices. Here is a notable utterance :—

" I have been astonished at the small number of even thought- ful men at Cambridge who were able to recognise the distinction between time and eternity. The prevalent idea seemed to be that, right or wrong, Maurice had invented it to meet a particular case. No one seemed to enter into the impossibility of a theology, or of the existence of a spiritual world, without it. Thompson was the only one I met who knew that it was to be found in Plato."

What was rare at Cambridge then is not very common, we fancy, now. What would the average parson of to-day say,

if he were asked whether there is any difference between everlasting" and " eternal " Hort obtained his Fellowship at Trinity in 1852 (at his second trial), was ordained by Bishop Wilberforce (of whom he gives a very pleasant account), and after a few years of

hard work at Cambridge, accepted in 1857 the college living of St. Ippolyts (near Hitchin). He married in the same year. At St. Ippolyts, a large village, and within reach of some very

good society, he remained for fourteen years, with a long interval (1863.65) of enforced rest,—rest, i.e., not from work, but from parochial duties. In 1872 he was called back to Cambridge as Theological Lecturer at Emmanuel College (Emmanuel deserves credit for a piece of excellent service to the University). Six years afterwards he was elected to the Hulsean Professorship of Divinity, and in 1887 became Lady Margaret Professor. He had been a candidate for the Knightsbridge Professorship of Moral Philosophy in 1868, when F. D. Maurice was elected. Neither knew of the other's candidature. Hort would have resigned if he had, and F. D.

Maurice would not have stood.

Hort never felt that he was too good for St. Ippolyts. It troubled him that others should think so. He gave his beat energies to parish work, and performed every duty, preaching, visiting, school-teaching, with a scrupulous care. But there were hindrances to his usefulness. One was his shyness and reserve, too easily mistaken for coldness and lack of interest;

another was what his biographer calls his aphasia. His ser- mons cost him a most painful effort. To put his thoughts into

words at all was a most laborious task, to put them into words that villagers could understand, almost impossible. The sermon on which he had begun to meditate early in the week he had seldom finished " before the early hours of Sunday morning."

His chief literary work during this period was the revision of the text of the Greek Testament. This task, carried on in conjunction with his lifelong friend, the present Bishop of Durham, was begun in 1853, and occupied nearly thirty years. The text appeared on May 12th, 1881, five days before the publication of the Revised Version of the New Testament.

The introduction appeared four months later. Never have the results of great labour been compressed into a narrower space, unless indeed it was in the Revised Version itself. This is not the place to estimate the value of Hort's contri- butions to these two works. The introduction to the Revised Text came from his pen, and it may be said without any depreciation of the labours of his distinguished collaborateur, that the most original part of it, the " Genealogical Evidence," the argument—i.e, built on the differences and similarities of " families " of manuscripts—belonged

mainly to him. In the revised translation he took a, great part. An unfriendly critic remarked that out of the nine

years spent on the work Hort had " talked three." His chief business at the sittings of the Company was, of course, to help in settling the reading that was to be translated. In this department he represented the reforming party, as Dr.

Scrivener championed the Conservatives, defenders of the traditional text, and on the whole he was successful in en- forcing his views. His industry was as conspicuous as his learning. He was present at nine-tenths of the sittings, and was always in his place from the beginning to the end.

That Hort should have produced but little else while he had such tasks upon his hands is not surprising. It is less evident why the ten years of life that remained after the Text and the Version were disposed of had so little to show. The aphasia that constrained his tongue touched also his pen. He wrote with difficulty ; he corrected with elaborate care. Un- fortunately what had cost the writer such toil could not be assimilated, at least by the average reader, with ease.

Yet it would be a great mistake to say that his was an un- productive life. The harvest of his toil was one that will be found after many days. Nor was it wanting in immediate results. The list of his published books is small, but the man was while he lived the oracle from whom many votaries —no word less strong would describe their devotion and faith —sought answers on questions that perplexed the intellect or the heart. And his answers remain a precious possession. (Witness the admirable letters on the Thirty-nine Articles, II., pp. 324.338.) For those who would know what was the outward semblance of the man there is this, a sketch by Professor Ryle :— " The familiar sight of the man with the quick nervous step, the left arm folded across books and papers, the right swinging vigorously across the body as he hurried down Trumpington Street past Peterhouse and the Pitt Press to St. Mary's, or to some meeting in the Divinity School, or as he rounded at full pace some buttress of books in the University Library, clings to the memory; or again, as he starts up from his chair where he is sitting before his papers and at his books, and comes out from behind the great revolving bookcase with the cheery welcome and the warm clasp of the hand ; you see him before you, the wonderful blue eye piercing keenly beneath the penthouse of bushy brow, the worn emaciated cheek, the noble forehead; you hear the bright glee of his merriment, you catch the tremendous energy of his purpose in all he says, his noble loyalty to his friends, the noble scorn of meanness."

The biographer, in whose volumes we have marked scores of passages which space compels us to leave unnoticed, has done his filial duty well. The glory of a biographer, as of a Periclean woman, is to avoid observation. Not the less are we able to appreciate his good-sense, his tact, and his piety.