Memoir of Charles Cardale Babington. 317 



Pleasure tracks students to their rooms ; surely our duty is 

 to follow the bane with the antidote ; to dog idleness to its 

 haunts, and fight it there. 



His love of letters was genuine, his taste sound and manly. 

 Of poets he affected, as one might surmise, Wordsworth and 

 Cowper, spokesmen of nature. "God made the country, and 

 man made the town." Crabbe he prized for plain dealing. 

 Sober-suited hymns — Thomas Ken's and George Herbert's — 

 were more to his mind than raptures. . Did you mention 

 Ken, he was apt to ask, "Do you know his Midnight 

 Hymn? Most folk neglect that." 



If ever there were a Bible Christian, it was he. The 

 book he judged, as he judged men, by it fruits. These he 

 gathered, not from critics or word-paiuters, but from the 

 voice of Missions. "There," he would say, "You have 

 the romance of real life." In the last few years I saw him 

 often ; for I bore messages from the Spanish and Italian 

 Reforms, from Campello and Cabrera. In faith and hope 

 he greeted for Southern Europe the dawning of a brighter 

 day. Countrymen of Savonarola and Father Paul, of Enzinas 

 and Cyprian de Valera, must at last awaken from millennial 

 slumber and challenge a place in "the parliament of man." 



Steadfast he was, some whispered strait-laced, in the resolve 

 never to worship God and the world together. No bribe, 

 no threat, could bend him to what he thought evil, that good 

 might come. He would break first. Did a charity, a church, 

 eke out its funds by raffles ; with such he would have 

 neither art nor part. He found honesty the best policy. 

 The light of his eyes, the Girls' Orphan Home, was like to 

 expire for lack of funds. The inmates must be warmed, 

 clothed, fed ; ways and means nowhere appeared. His 

 extremity was, in his old-fashioned phrase, God's opportunity. 

 B}^ what we call chance, after no appeal on his part, visitor 

 after visitor turned up — like the "god from the machine" 

 (the stage heaven) of Greek theatre, like " the angel enter- 

 tained unawares" of a love deep-rooted in his heart — to lift 

 his cart out of the mire ; that he put his own shoulder to 

 the wheel, stands to reason ; it was the instinct of his life — 

 I might say, watchword — that he was given to "do noble 

 things, not speak them, all day long." To return to the 

 visitors, the good fairies. One brought serge for frocks, one 



