All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great taskmaster's eye.
Two generations after he had quitted the university, Mr. Gladstone summed up her influence upon him:—
Oxford had rather tended to hide from me the great fact that liberty is a great and precious gift of God, and that human excellence cannot grow up in a nation without it. And yet I do not hesitate to say that Oxford had even at this time laid the foundations of my liberalism. School pursuits had revealed little; but in the region of philosophy she had initiated if not inured me to the pursuit of truth as an end of study. The splendid integrity of Aristotle, and still more of Butler, conferred upon me an inestimable service. Elsewhere I have not scrupled to speak with severity of myself, but I declare that while in the arms of Oxford, I was possessed through and through with a single-minded and passionate love of truth, with a virgin love of truth, so that, although I might be swathed in clouds of prejudice there was something of an eye within, that might gradually pierce them.
FOOTNOTES:
[34] Charles Wordsworth's Annals.
[35] After Peel had begun his career, Jackson gave him a piece of advice that would have pleased Mr. Gladstone:—'Let no day pass without your having Homer in your hand. Elevate your own mind by continual meditation on the vastness of his comprehension and the unerring accuracy of all his conceptions. If you will but read him four or five times over every year, in a half a dozen years you will know him by heart, and he well deserves it.'—Parker's Life of Sir R. Peel, i. p.28.
[36] On the four periods of Aristotelian study at Oxford in the first half of the century see Pattison's Essays, i. P. 463.
[37] Ibid., i. p. 465.
[38] Reprinted from the Edingburgh Review in Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, pp. 401-559. (1852.)