248 WBITING AND CONSEBVATISM 



I always try to love my enemies, but I think it 

 can hardly be inconsistent with Christian principles to 

 hate bores, seeing that the New Testament lays down 

 no injunction as to how they are to be treated, unless 

 by a slight change of spelling they are to be driven 

 down a steep place to perish in the water below.* 



It is not easy to avoid conveying the impression of 

 a fiercely intolerant and prejudiced man, impatient of 

 opposition, and convinced of his own unassailable exact- 

 ness. Such he might, and doubtless did, seem to some 

 on first acquaintance, but, good fighter as he was, and 

 hating innovations, he had the keenest sense of justice. 

 Mr. A. C. Benson wrote f of him : "I never saw a man 

 who took a defeat better. He fought to the last 

 moment, and when he was outvoted, he accepted the 

 situation gracefully and good-humouredly. I never 

 heard him make any sort of criticism or recrimination 

 afterwards." 



It is not unkind to say that he was almost com- 

 pletely lacking in emotion, but under his somewhat 

 grim exterior lay a really warm heart and an un- 

 expected depth of affection for and understanding of 

 others. He took a keen personal interest in the young 

 men who came to visit him, and his judgments of their 

 capabilities were seldom at fault : — 



Balfour, J scholar of Trinity, was here last night; 



• Letters to Canon H. B. Tristram, September, 1892. 



t Op. cit. 



% Francis Maitknd Balfour, bom 1851, Scholar and Fellow of Trin. 

 Coll. Camb. Oxford was most anxious to gain him as a successor to the 

 late Professor 6. Bolleston, and Edinburgh made repeated efforts to 

 secure him for her chair of Natural History. But he would not leave his 

 own university, and in recognition of his worth and loyalty a special pro- 

 fessorship of animal morphology was, in the spring of 1882, founded for 

 him at Cambridge. On July 18, 1882, he and his guide set out from 

 Courmayeur to ascend the virgin peak of the Aiguille Blanche de Peu- 

 teret. They never came back alive (" Diet, of Nat. Biography"). 



