entering a new year—oh how earnestly I do hope that, through His grace who alone can keep me, it may be a year of profit and advancement in holiness!  I have thought a good deal about it, though not so much as I could wish.  How many blessings I have to be thankful for that I have received during the past year, when sorrow and affliction have been scattered all around me!  How wonderfully all of us have been preserved in perfect health and enjoyment!”

A few months after this, in a letter from Hampstead, he mentions walking across the fields one Sunday morning to St. John’s and hearing a sermon from Mr. Noel that greatly impressed him; the subject was “The necessity and efficacy of diligence in religion.”

“He really seemed as if he had meant it for me, for I had been thinking a great deal how far more diligently I pursued my mathematics than my religion.”

Yet at this time he was teaching in a Sunday School every Sunday—rather a rare thing for an undergraduate in those days.

Here occurs an allusion to one who was destined to occupy a warm share in his affection during years to come:—

“I met the other day Perry, who was Senior Wrangler and fifth on the Classical Tripos, and finding that he was going to take pupils I have engaged him for next term, provided my father intends to be so liberal as to let me have a tutor.”

For over sixty years the friendship was strong and deep, and after Bishop Perry’s resignation of the See of Melbourne their intercourse was frequent and loving up to the end.  In the Lent Term of 1832 he writes:—

“I have been getting on this week tolerably in my reading, and intolerably in my rowing, having been bumped by the Johnians on Thursday for the first time in my life, and that too when we might have got away with the greatest ease if all our crew had exerted themselves.”

Half a century afterwards his curates were often exhorted to work together with a will, and the exhortation was enforced by allusions to the disasters experienced by a crew whose members were not absolutely one in “go” and sympathy.

The following letter from his father has reference to College events at this time:—

“London, March 19th, 1832.

“Dear Edward,—A hasty opinion is not always worth having, but you may safely take my advice and try the new boat, bump the first Trinity, and wait for further orders.  Let your mother’s letter compel you to watch yourself, and if you find the effects of rowing at all prejudicial give it up, but if you find your health and strength on the wax go on, tempering your zeal with moderation, and I will do my best to make peace at home—a work which I shall accomplish with more ease and in less time than you will be at the head of the river.  It came across me that, after having vanquished all Cambridge, you might wish to carry your victorious oars to Oxford!”

A fortnight after the last quoted letter from the young collegian, there was another which recounted that, although his boat, of which he was stroke, had gone down as low as fifth, yet on the last race-day it had recovered its old place of second.  Then follows a groan concerning the difficulties that attended his post as captain over a discordant body of twenty men: “The crew, when successful, get all the credit, and in the time of misfortune make me their scapegoat.”

Fortunately he did not adhere to his original intention of resigning the captaincy, and ultimately his boat attained the proud position of head of the river.  Edward Hoare’s success in rowing did not make him idle, however: nothing could do that; into whatever he undertook he threw his whole heart and soul, and the very next letter, a few weeks later, May 4th, 1832, begins thus:—

“Here I am a scholar of Trinity safe and sound, as the master calls it ‘discipulus juratus et admissus,’ and not a little pleased am I at the thought.  But what pleases me most of all is that, so far from being last of all, as our list declares, I have come in very high on the list.  I do not know exactly where I am, but, as you wish for all the reports, I tell you one which I don’t quite believe, which is that I was the second in both years.  I beat all the third year, and all my own except the great lion Stevenson, and I got within a respectable distance of him, and Peacock says I have gained upon him since the last examination, whereas I never expected to get within miles of him.  In fact I am altogether happier than I can express, and really think that I never spent so joyful a night and day in all my life.”

Referring to this success his father writes again:—

“Hampstead, May 8th, 1832.

“My dear Edward,—Of advice and congratulations you will partake abundantly without an addition from me, but your mother wishes me to write, what I have no doubt Sam has already written.  What may be the best course for you to pursue I have not made up my mind, but as you are at Cambridge it is as well to remind you that a man may be happy without mathematics, and that the glory of being Senior Wrangler (supposing the possibility of such an event) may be purchased at too high a price.  I attribute the greatest proportion of your late honours to solid understanding and reading, some part to good luck or accident.  Had you not then better see the result of the class examination before you take the plunge?  With the blessing of God you will be rooted more deeply than ever now in all our hearts, and, what is far beyond extending growth here, you attain that eminence which is quite out of the sound of wrangling.

“I am most affectionately yours,
“S. Hoare.”

A few days later he receives the news of the sudden death of a relative, Mr. Powell, [24] and various letters describe the effect that this event had upon him.  His sympathy was warmly expressed for all the mourners; and then, as was natural to a thoughtful mind, the remembrance of the shortness of life made itself felt.  Strong and athletic as he was, he too might be cut off suddenly: was he ready for the call?

But his recent success at the scholarship examination, and his future hopes, seem to have had a strange light thrown upon them by this bereavement, and he began to ask himself the question which some of us have had to face in hours of success or failure—“What are College honours?  Are they an end, or only a means?”  He writes thus:—

“I never felt so strongly as I do now the utter worthlessness of the objects at which I have been aiming with so much zeal.  What does it signify whether I am fourth, fifth, sixth, or anything else in this examination, when at one stroke all one’s honour and all one’s learning may be dashed from you?  It has impressed me very strongly with the feeling that to read because it is my duty and because it is an admirable preparation for after-life is a glorious object, but to read (as I must confess I have done) for a place and a place only, and slur over higher