BISHOP WESTCOTT.
ITo Tar EDITOR OP Tilt " SPECTAPOR."1 Srs,—Much has been said and written about the great BiA0 of Durham, so recently removed from us, but of such a men the last word will never be spoken. A thousand lifelike sketches may come from every quarter, but even then you win have but a meagre portrait. If you can find room.for a little sketch of him in his early Harrow days, it may perhaps meet the eye of some old schoolfellow, who will, I hone, endorse it.
What, then, did Westcott look like to a boy of fifteen in 1855 ? Well, he seemed utterly unlike any other master. As a master, we thought him a very poor specimen. A. cheeky boy felt inclined to take all sorts of liberties with him. He used none of the ordinary methods of discipline, or if he tried to use them, he did not succeed. But gradually you began to feel that you were in the presence of a man who had a power quite different from that of any other master. Perhaps you had begun by making fun of his appearance, his small, insignificant, and rather neglected exterior, but you soon began to learn that what you had to reckon with was something which as a boy you could not put a name to, but which afterwards you learnt to call his "soul." You watched his large pale-blue eyes gazing into some- thing "beyond"; or turned with deepest interest into your own heart. You didn't understand it, but you were drawn to him. You felt he cared for you, and trusted you, and believed in yon. And not in you only, but in every boy in the pupil-room. He never suspected or looked for evil in any boy._ His own absolute guilelessness imputed guilelessness to others. Of course this would open the way at times to trouble. He was imposed RAO% mean tricks were played on him by mean boys. But even so, he hardly seemed to notice it, and if he tried to punish he was a dead failure! But in the majority of boys his goodness met with a response. This absolute trust was a mighty power. To be with him, to speak to him, to be spoken to by him' was to be unconsciously drawn to a higher level, to the things that are "true and pure, and lovely .and of good report." His intensity of voice and manner and look gave an extraordinary force to everything hs said or did, even in the commonplace of the pupil-room. What Canon Scott Holland in this month's Commonwealth says of him when he first saw him fifteen years later in Peterborough Cathedral, "This tiny form with the thin small voice, delivering itself with passionate intensity of the deepest teaching on the mystery of the Incarnation" (to two timid ladies of the Close and a solitary verger), was equally true of him in the Harrow pupil. room. This intensity of voice and expression, this power of giving his best no matter who was listening to him, was habitual to him. His intense belief in yon, your goodness, your powers, sometimes had ludicrous results. "Hie touching belief in our powers of scholarship," says Scott Holland, "used sometimes to shatter our self-control.' Doubtless this was a daily experience in the pupil-room ; but even in the matter of Latin grammar and Greek verse, it is sometimes true, possunt quia posse videnter. At any rate, in regard to schoolboys, it is a good thing to be trusted and to be believed in. And this is just what Westcott did and where lay his power. He believed in his boys, he believed they were pure and good and true, and so they became so. And he loved them, as well as believed in them. His affection for his boys followed them in after life, and if some joy or sorrow that touched you deeply came to his knowledge, soon there would come some brief but intense expression of sympathy from the now aged master to a perhaps grey-haired pupil. Truly it will be hard to see his like again !
—I am, Sir, &c., WALTER E. MEDLicoTT.
Swanmore Vicarage, Hants.
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