LIFE OF DR. ROLLESTON. XV11 



to rest over it, and in the midst of it are to be seen moving 

 great figures. At present we are so close to them that they 

 only impress us with our own littleness, not with their greatness. 

 We are like the travellers at the foot of the Sphinx : its real size, 

 its true proportions, are only seen at a distance. Though dis- 

 tance takes away from the distinctness, it adds to the majesty 

 of its features. Now look at Arnold. In a profession in which 

 liberal opinions were a sure bar to preferment, he stood forth 

 as an uncompromising advocate for freedom. His views were 

 distorted neither by prejudice nor by precedents, by establish- 

 ments, nor by interest. As dispassionately as the mathematician 

 he proposed his problem, and as calmly he declared the result, 

 careless of everything but truth. "By the one party accused 

 as mystic, by the other as infidel." The man rises before us 

 like a granite mountain, and the crows and choughs around its 

 base show scarce so gross as beetles. The mean man could not 

 explain, the weak man could not comprehend, his conduct. To 

 me there is no subject so pleasing and none so ennobling as the 

 triumph of will over interest, and the victory of conscience over 

 expediency. But I shall tire you with my opinions . . . .' 



In 1850 Rolleston took a First Class in Classics, and next 

 year was elected a Fellow of Pembroke. The fellowship which 

 he took was the medical one lately founded by Mrs. Sheppard, 

 and this circumstance was the turning-point of his life, de- 

 termining him to take to Medicine as his profession. It is 

 a good index of the change of educational ideas within the 

 last generation, that one meets with no letters to or from 

 Rolleston at this time complaining of his having spent four 

 of the most receptive years of his life exclusively on classical 

 studies, hardly in the remotest degree bearing on his future 

 profession. Under the present system a student looking forward 

 to the career of Medicine does not abandon altogether the 

 literary culture which is the University's heritage, but he soon 

 ceases to devote his whole time to letters, and passes on into the 

 special lines of science suited to form the ground-work for his 

 future profession. Only men of exceptional energy and capacity 



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