‘So should he rest—not where daisies are growing:
Newton beside him, and over his head
Trinity’s full tide of life, ebbing, flowing,
Morning and evening, as he lies dead.
‘Sailors sleep best within boom of the billow,
Soldiers in sound of the shrill trumpet call:
So his own Chapel his death-sleep should pillow,
Loved in his life-time with love beyond all.’
We have not thought it necessary to go through the events of Whewell’s Mastership in order, because progressive development of thought and occupation had by that time ended, and his efforts were chiefly directed towards establishing in the University the changes which his previous studies had led him to regard as necessary, and which, from the vantage-ground of that influential position, he was enabled to enforce. In his own College, so far as its education was concerned, he had little to do except to maintain the high standard which already existed. As tutor he had been successful in increasing the importance of the paper of questions in Philosophy in the Fellowship Examination; and subsequently he had introduced his Elements of Morality, his preface to Mackintosh’s Ethical Philosophy, and his edition of Butler’s Three Sermons into the examination at the end of the Michaelmas Term. None, however, of those fundamental measures which have achieved for Trinity College its present position of pre-eminence will in the future be associated with his name, unless the abolition of the Westminster Scholars be thought sufficiently important to be classed in this category. On the contrary, it is remarkable what slight influence he exerted on the College while Master. He saw but little of any of the Fellows, and became intimate with none. In theory he was a despot, but in practice he deferred to the College officers; and, with the exception of certain domestic matters, such as granting leave to studious undergraduates to live in College during the Long Vacation, and the formation of a cricket-ground for the use of the College, to which he and Lady Affleck both contributed largely, he originated nothing. As regards the constitution of the College, he was strongly opposed to change. The so-called Reform of the Statutes in 1842 amounted to nothing more than the excision of certain obsolete usages, and the accommodation in some few other points of the written law to the usual practice of the College. The proposals for a more thorough reform brought forward by certain of the Fellows in 1856, when called together in accordance with the Act of Parliament passed in that year, met with his vehement disapproval. It was a mental defect with him that he could never be brought to see that others had as much right as himself to hold special views. If he saw no defect in a statute or a practice, no one else had any right to see one. Here is a specimen of the language he used respecting the junior Fellows, all, it must be remembered, men of some distinction, whom he himself had had a hand in electing:
‘It is a very sad evening of my College life, to have the College pulled in pieces and ruined by a set of schoolboys. It is very nearly that kind of work. The Act of Parliament gives all our Fellows equal weight for certain purposes, and the younger part of them all vote the same way, and against the Seniors. Several of these juveniles are really boys, several others only Bachelors of Arts, so we have crazy work, as I think it[[13]].’