xxvi MEMOIR. 
injustice, and what he seems to have taken for 
"incorrigible idleness," was in reality nothing else 
than the demand of nature within him for some 
real rest and relaxation from his Oxford studies. 
His scrupulous conscientiousness, moreover, was 
already beginning to cause him much anxiety with 
regard to his future life, as the time for his leaving 
Oxford was approaching. That warning voice of 
nature, however, unhappily was not attended to. 
He would have entered the Schools for his final 
examination the succeeding autumn, or at latest 
the following spring ; but in the latter part of the 
summer of this year (1864), under the strain of 
overwork, his health broke completely down, and 
for a period of some years he was obliged to live in 
a state of enforced, and to him scarcely endurable, 
inactivity. A great portion of this time he spent in 
the retired parts of Wales, and the English Lake 
District, and some part of it in Ireland. On one 
occasion, during this period, writing to one of 
his brothers on his experiences of overwork, he 
says : — 
" Let me advise you earnestly not to try to do 
too many things. I killed the goose with a vengeance, 
and got no golden ^•gg. I was expecting in a few 
weeks [when taken ill] a degree with honours, and 
a good start in life, and . . . had to leave Oxford 
without even an ordinary degree, which I knew 
