“illness prevents the privilege of joining those who will gather in large numbers to do her honour. But though not present in person I shall be with them in spirit, and in the hearty desire to give to her of the fullest appreciation of her personal qualities and of her great services to the cause of education, particularly of the higher education of women.
“I first met her at Dr. Hodgson’s, nearly twenty-five years ago. For many years I saw a great deal of her, especially at the time when I was secretary of the Girls’ Public Day School Company. From the first I was profoundly impressed by her insight into educational problems, but, most of all, by her devotion, heart and soul, to the work to which she had put her hand.”
Mr. Storr speaks not only as an educationalist but as a friend—
“I mourn a very old and very true friend. I always felt with her that, differ as we might—and we often differed on educational politics—she was absolutely single-eyed, and her judgment was never warped by personal ambition or arrière pensée. My girls, as you know, were greatly attached to her, and I owe her much as having set them the example of a noble-minded, generous, great-souled woman.”
Her influence over young men, the friends of her nephews, or brothers of her pupils, was very remarkable, and it would not be easy to count the number who can add to the words of one of the college friends of the Rev. Francis F. Buss—
“To me your aunt’s friendship was a most valued privilege, and I owe very much to her both on account of her personal influence over me, and the many pleasant friendships she made for me; and last, but not least, that she was one of the first people to introduce me to ladies’ society at all.”
Her letters to her nephew while at Cambridge quite explain this influence. She was not in the least afraid of young men, but was her own real true self always, thus touching the reality below their surface pretences. Here is one of her grave letters—
“I am very deep in work, but I manage to find time for you, and to think of you and your approaching ordination. You are about to take the most serious step in your life, and I hope and pray that it may be blessed to you and to those among whom you may have to work during the rest of your life. It is a noble profession, but one that entails much self-control and self-sacrifice. But if you think chiefly of the work to which you are called, and not of yourself, you will be useful and happy. You must not think too much about what people may say or think of you, but simply do your work faithfully and leave the results. You are disposed to mind ‘Mrs. Grundy’ too much, my very dear boy, but this is not a good thing if carried to excess. To be careful in imagination, to put one’s self into the place of another, is right, but this is the opposite of minding ‘Mrs. Grundy.’”
These letters are full of wisdom as well as of tender thoughtfulness. She wanted him to profit to the full by the advantages which she esteemed so highly.
“At Cambridge, more than anywhere else,” she says (for the moment forgetting Oxford), “is to be found the highest product, so far, of human civilization. Men there get the highest culture ever yet attained, and the ‘Dons’ are also the most finished gentlemen. There is an indescribable something in the bearing, air, tone of voice even, of a Cambridge man which I believe he never loses all his life. But the men are most courteous towards women: that is one distinct mark of their training. I have never heard a rough word nor seen a rough act towards women, and I want you to become such a man as the best men in your University.”