Henry Morley's Last Work
will do that the storm is over. I am told that if I take right care of myself there should be another eight years' work in me. But proper care means life at Carisbrooke quietly occupied with work on 'English Writers' and allied writings. I shall resign every engagement made in London this year for meeting or lecture, resign my place on the London Library Committee, and be no more Chairman of Council at College Hall, wipe the whole slate clean except one item: I hope to complete my service with the Apothecaries by proceeding to the office of Master and doing its duties until August, 1895, when I resign finally from my work there. This arrangement of my way of life brings 'English Writers' to the front, my strongest wish will be to complete it, and, with care of health, I do not see how I could fail to produce easily the two volumes a year. I think what I have said puts you where I stand. My hope is that in about a fortnight I shall be at work again on Vol. XI. At present I only try to write each day about a letter more than on the last.
"With kind regards, believe me, dear Mr. Editor,—Yours always sincerely,"Henry Morley."
The eleventh volume was completed by one of Morley's most brilliant students, Prof. Hall Griffin, who has long since followed his teacher into the silence. He spent many days at the British Museum compiling the Bibliography which appears at the end of the volume, but it was a labour of love. In the Preface he pays a beautiful tribute to the master whose fine spirit he had caught. "To him," he writes, "a book was no dead thing. . . . He felt, and was able to make others feel, the humanity which pulsates in a true book, so that literature became instinct with life and a source of spiritual inspiration; the written words of the past he valued because he felt in them a power which could touch the life of the present and influence the future. . . . Large-hearted and broad-minded, he would not seek to trammel in others the love of literary study which he had inspired. And as one modern teacher has declared, 'No true disciple of mine will ever be a Ruskinian; he will follow not me, but the instinct of his own soul and the guidance of its Creator,'
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