Robertson. Both were known, admired, loved by their personal friends; but in each case, their chief power for good, and the fame which that power brought with it, were the result of posthumous authorship. In his lifetime he had published little, and that little had been anonymous, and in partnership with his brother Julius. A defence of the truth of the Gospel narrative of the Resurrection appeared in 1824, under the title of A Layman's Letters to the Author of the "Trial of the Witnesses," the book thus replied to being a popularised reproduction of the objections of the Deistic writers of the eighteenth century, and the explanations of the Paulus school of Rationalism. To this publication his brother Julius contributed the Fourth Letter, in which, with his wider knowledge of German theological literature, he fought the battle on the ground which the Rationalists had chosen. The rest of the book was a terse, vigorous answer to the more vulgar form of denial which was then represented by Taylor and Hone and Carlisle, and this was entirely the work of Augustus. Those who know the clear, bold English of the Alton Sermons, and the epigrammatic point of most of the Guesses which came from his pen, can form some estimate of the effective skill with which those weapons were employed by him. Different as the details of the strategy of the enemy may be now, those who wish to answer M. Renan's version of the Resurrection, so as to gain the ear of acute bu half-taught men, will not find it lost labour to turn to the Layman's Letters.* In 1826 the Brothers were again united in the publication of the Guesses at Truth. But this also was * With a view of more readily gaining access to the class they wished to reach, the book in question was published, not by Rivington or Hatchard, or other firms of orthodox repute, but by the Hunts, from whose press had issued the attack to which it was an answer. For the same reason it was brought out anonymously published anonymously, and, although neither of the writers drew a veil of mystery around him, it could hardly be said that it made their names known beyond a comparatively small circle. When, however, it fell to Julius Hare's lot to look over the MS. Sermons which his brother had left behind him, and from those to select the fifty-six which were published in 1835, the result was an immediate and wide-spread popularity. Nothing like them existed then, and but little has appeared since, in the whole range of English pulpit literature. Though written, as has been said, for one of the smallest parishes in England, there was, from first to last, no trace of haste or slovenliness. Instead of the tame decorous conventionalities of most preachers, men found there a racy and hearty strength, the mind of a man speaking to men, not in the tone of a scholar lowering himself to the "level of the meanest capacity,” but of one who had found the common ground of thought and feeling, on which he and the labourer could take their stand, and hold converse with each other. That the popularity thus gained was not merely ephemeral, that laymen have found in the book what they wanted, and that preachers have turned to it, if not as a model to be imitated, yet as full of pregnant hints, may be inferred from the fact that it has passed through not less than five editions. The life of Julius Charles Hare was at once longer and more conspicuous, and may be told at somewhat greater length. Very much of what was most characteristic in it may be traced to an attack of illness at the age of nine, which interrupted his studies at Tunbridge School, then under the mastership of Dr. Vicesimus Knox, and led to his travelling with his father and mother in Germany. The winter of 1804-5 was spent at Weimar. The boy picked up some knowledge of German, and the names of Goethe and Schiller (the latter died at Weimar during his stay there) became familiar things to him. Leaving that city in May, 1805, he saw, as he used to tell with emphatic glee in later years, the Wartburg in which the great Reformer had found refuge, and learnt to follow his example in "throwing inkstands at the Devil." The death of his mother at Lausanne in April, 1806, led to his return to England, and threw him under the influence of an aunt, his mother's sister, the widow of the great Oriental scholar, Sir William Jones. In her, he and his brothers found, in the words which he himself placed on record on her tomb, "a second mother, a monitress wise and loving, both in encouragement and reproof," and to his reverence for her may be ascribed much of the nobleness and purity of character, the chivalrous respect for womanhood which distinguished his whole life. Soon after his return to England in 1806, he was sent to Charterhouse, then under Dr. Raine, and remained there till he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1812. Among his school companions were some whose names afterwards, like his own, became conspicuous, and with some of whom companionship ripened into a life-long friendship,--Connop Thirlwall, now Bishop of St. David's, the present Dean of Durham, and his brother, Mr. Waddington, the late Under-Secretary of the Home Department, Sir William Norris, and General Havelock. The three first-named went up with him to Trinity, and among the freshmen of the same year was William Whewell.* Dr. Wordsworth was then Master, and Mr. Sedgwick a Tutor of the College. *I owe many of the particulars that follow to a letter written by the late Master of Trinity, a few months before his death. Hare went up with a high reputation both as a scholar and mathematician. He was said to have read through the Principia before his Cambridge life began, and brought with him a knowledge of English and European literature far less common then among Cambridge undergraduates than it would be now. Classical studies, however, scon exercised an absorbing charm over him. He gave up reading for mathematical honours, and was thus shut out, according to the system which then prevailed, from competing for the Chancellor's medal. This comparative failure, however, was counterbalanced by success in College examinations, which were less restricted, and he took his place among the "goodly company" of the Fellows of Trinity, in October, 1818. Three years and a half before this, in April, 1815, he had lost his father. During the incidents of this period, I find the following noted in some brief chronological memoranda as to his life which he himself dictated, and which serve as the basis of this notice: "1814. First read Wordsworth." To him, as to so many others, that was an epoch in his life, raising him out of what was artificial and conventional in literature to the higher beauty of simplicity and truth.* With the warmth of admiration which always characterised him, he went back to Cambridge to preach his new belief, in defiance of the Edinburgh Review, and the laughter of undergraduates. Among his early opponents, soon to become a convert, was William Whewell. "My tastes," the latter writes, were the common vulgar tastes of that day, the tastes to which the Rejected Addresses so successfully appealed. . . I began our intercourse (this was in 1816) by ridiculing some passages, especially the 'solemn bleat' of the Excursion. 66 I * The dedication to the Guesses in 1838 shows that this feeling of reverence stood the test of time, and was even stronger in the maturity of manhood than it had been in the glow of youth. recollect on one occasion saying to him, in reference to some of the objects of his admiration, ‘Do you not see how unwisely you proceed? You adopt the philosophy of certain writers because you admire their poetry.' He replied, in his most sententious manner, with an emphasis on every word, 'But poetry is philosophy, and philosophy is poetry.' The championship was carried, with more or less success, into the debates of the Cambridge Union.* Soon afterwards, on the occasion of one of the poet's visits to his brother, the Master of Trinity, he was introduced to his young admirer, and the acquaintance ripened into friendship. "I recollect," writes Dr. Whewell, “a very interesting conversation, mainly between Wordsworth and Hare. The question was the relative value of the Saxon and the Latin portions of the English language. Hare was at that time disposed, as much as possible, to reject the latter. Wordsworth held that the mixture of the two elements made the language richer, and often modified a thought or image in a way that Saxon could not have done. Thus,' he said, quoting his own poetry, where he describes himself and his schoolfellows as skating by moonlight, in the line which says that their movements Into the woodland sent an alien sound,' "the word “alien" conveys a feeling which no more familiar word could have expressed.' Hare replied, still quoting from the poet, 'No; I like an accumulation of short Saxon words, such as in those lines, "The world is too much with us; morn and eve, Wordsworth replied, by quoting a strong example of style Those who recollect the talk of the Bachelors' table at Trinity at this period speak of the vehemence with which Hare, then daily plunging deeper into the philosophy of Germany, used to utter his dislike of "Mr. I ocke" and his system, as still fresh in their memory. |