Another voice was that of the Corn Law convert, whose phantom he had

just seen in the quadrangle with a great bell. Jude thought his soul

might have been shaping the historic words of his master-speech: "Sir, I may be wrong, but my impression is that my duty towards a

country threatened with famine requires that that which has been the

ordinary remedy under all similar circumstances should be resorted to

now, namely, that there should be free access to the food of man from

whatever quarter it may come... Deprive me of office to-morrow, you

can never deprive me of the consciousness that I have exercised the

powers committed to me from no corrupt or interested motives, from no

desire to gratify ambition, for no personal gain."

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Then the sly author of the immortal Chapter on Christianity: "How

shall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophic

world, to those evidences [miracles] which were presented by

Omnipotence? ... The sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the

awful spectacle, and appeared unconscious of any alterations in the

moral or physical government of the world."

Then the shade of the poet, the last of the optimists:

How the world is made for each of us!

* * * * * And each of the Many helps to recruit

The life of the race by a general plan.

Then one of the three enthusiasts he had seen just now, the author of

the _Apologia_: "My argument was ... that absolute certitude as to the truths of

natural theology was the result of an assemblage of concurring and

converging probabilities ... that probabilities which did not reach

to logical certainty might create a mental certitude."

The second of them, no polemic, murmured quieter things:

Why should we faint, and fear to live alone,

Since all alone, so Heaven has will'd, we die?

He likewise heard some phrases spoken by the phantom with the short

face, the genial Spectator: "When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion of envy dies

in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate

desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a

tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of

the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those

whom we must quickly follow."

And lastly a gentle-voiced prelate spoke, during whose meek, familiar

rhyme, endeared to him from earliest childhood, Jude fell asleep:

Teach me to live, that I may dread

The grave as little as my bed.

Teach me to die ...




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