44° LAST CONFESSIONS. [XVII. have given no more lectures. But I have always believed, in the case of other people, that the reward of good work is to have more work given you ; and I do trust that it may be so with myself. If the gifts that I have done my best to make useful here are such as can for a little time be made useful elsewhere, I am grateful and hopeful in the change, although it is so very different from anything that I thought I was working for. I am going to leave with Oxford many, very many friends ; to leave but not I trust to lose them. I hope that I have made no enemies, I have more dread of making enemies than is at all consistent with a properly constituted moral courage. I hope that I have succeeded. At all events I have never reviewed the books of ally or opponent, or any one else ; I have never given pain or incurred hostility in that way. I have abstained from controversy, religious, political or historical, for I have tried to live up to my own ideal of a strong position, that it consists far more in proved confidence in your own cause, in the vigilant maintenance of your own defences, in the thorough realisation of your sources of strength and weakness, than in the most adroit use of weapons or the most energetic tactics of aggression. I have never scrupled to correct my own mistakes, and I have never made a captious use of the mistakes of other men. I trust that I have never plucked a candidate in the Schools without giving hirh every opportunity of setting himself right. I hope that I have never intrigued or bullied : I do not say this with any wish to imply that such things are ever done here; although the popular idea of the professorial character might suggest the need of a disclaimer; but, if there was temptation to do so, I claim to have resisted it. So much I trust that you will let me take credit for. I know that I have great faults ; I have a good deal of sympathy but too little zeal : sometimes I have feared that, in my lack of zeal, my fellow-workers have