While the late Jeffery Parker concludes his Recollections with these words:—
Whether a professor is usually a hero to his demonstrator I cannot say; I only know that, looking back across an interval of many years and a distance of half the circumference of the globe, I have never ceased to be impressed with the manliness and sincerity of his character, his complete honesty of purpose, his high moral standard, his scorn of everything mean or shifty, his firm determination to speak what he held to be truth at whatever cost of popularity. And for these things "I loved the man, and do honour to his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any."
Even those who scarcely knew him apart from his books, underwent the influence of that "determination to speak what he held to be truth." I may perhaps be allowed to quote in illustration two passages from letters to myself—one written by a woman, the other by a man:—
"'The surest-footed guide' is exactly true, to my feeling. Everybody else, among the great, used to disappoint one somewhere. He—never!"
"He was so splendidly brave that one can never repay one's debt to him for his example. He made all pretence about religious belief, and the kind of half-thinking things out, and putting up in a slovenly way with half-formed conclusions, seem the base thing which it really is."
CHAPTER 3.16.
1895.
[I have often regretted that I did not regularly take notes of my father's conversation, which was striking, not so much for the manner of it—though that was at once copious and crisp,—as for the strength and substance of what he said. Yet the striking fact, the bit of philosophy, the closely knitted argument, were perfectly unstudied, and as in other most interesting talkers, dropped into the flow of conversation as naturally as would the more ordinary experiences of less richly stored minds.
However, in January 1895 I was staying at Eastbourne, and jotted down several fragments of talk as nearly as I could recollect them. Conversation not immediately noted down I hardly dare venture upon, save perhaps such an unforgettable phrase as this, which I remember his using one day as we walked on the hills near Great Hampden]:—"It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy."