authority, and never sentimentally. They were beautiful and moving
little dramas, reverently performed. Unhappily I never saw one of them.
Even now I remember with a stab of regret that he came to stay with me
at Cambridge for one of these, and besought me to go with him. But I was
shy and busy, and though I could easily have arranged to go, I did not
and he went off alone. "Can't you really manage it?" he said.
"Pray-a-do!" But I was obdurate, and it gives me pain now to think that
I churlishly refused, though it is a false pathos to dwell on such
things, and both foolish and wrong to credit the dead with remembering
trifling grievances.

But I do not think that his time at the Catholic rectory was a really
very happy one. He needed more freedom; he became gradually aware that
his work lay in the direction of writing, of lecturing, of preaching,
and of advising. He took his own measure and knew his own strength. "I
have _no_ pastoral gift," he once said to me very emphatically. "I am
not the man to _prop_," he once wrote; "I can kindle sometimes, but not
support. People come to me and pass on." Nor was he at ease in the
social atmosphere of Cambridge--it seemed to him bleak, dry,
complacently intellectual, unimaginative. He felt himself what the law
describes as "a suspected person," with vague designs on the spiritual
life of the place.

At first, he was not rich enough to live the sort of life he desired;
but he began to receive larger incomes from his books, and to see that
it would soon be in his power to make a home for himself. It was then
that our rambles in search of possible houses began, while at the same
time he curtailed his own personal expenditure to the lowest limits,
till his wardrobe became conspicuous for its antiquity. This, however,
he was wholly indifferent about; his aim was to put together a