Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/26

 same summer he travelled in France with Roundell Palmer (afterwards Lord Selborne).

After Palmer's departure he met, in Paris, Charlotte, orphan daughter of the Rev. George Day of Earsham, near Bungay, to whom he became engaged to be married. On his return to Christ Church he was appointed to a public tutorship by Gaisford (dean in 1831), and was ordained deacon by Bishop Bagot of Oxford (21 Dec. 1834). He did not proceed to the priesthood until six years later (13 Dec. 1840).

Meanwhile, at midsummer 1835, he was elected second master of Winchester College. The mastership had never been held except by a Wykehamist. The office brought him an opportunity for the exercise of his special faculty of teaching and a valuable experience of management, involving the inner control of the ancient college and its seventy scholars. He enjoyed there not only the intimate friendship of Warden Barter, but close companionship with George Moberly [q. v.], the headmaster (afterwards bishop of Salisbury), and frequent intercourse with John Keble at Hursley. His marriage followed on 29 Dec. 1835 in Norwich Cathedral, and his married life was extremely happy. But Mrs. Wordsworth died after giving birth to her only child, a daughter (Charlotte Emmeline), 10 May 1839. The Latin distich which concludes his epitaph on her (in the antechapel of the college) has become famous:

I, nimium dilecta, vocat Deus; I, bona nostræ Pars animæ: mærens altera, disce sequi.

Her death was followed (31 Dec. 1839) by that of his elder brother John. To Wordsworth and to Warden Barter (who began the sermons in chapel) the initiation of a new period in the religious life of our oldest public school was largely due. His efforts were directed chiefly to make the traditional system of the place real. He succeeded in instituting a set time for private prayer. The chapel service was much improved, partly by the efforts of John Pyke Hullah [q. v.], who came at Wordsworth's request to teach every college boy to sing, as the statutes required that they should be able to do. Owing to his decisive and yet persuasive method of teaching, his expectation of great results, his taste in scholarship, and his camaraderie in games, Wordsworth had probably a greater ability to draw boys out into a manly way of church religion than any schoolmaster of the period. He was orthodox but not narrow. He inherited from his father and his friends, such as Joshua Watson [q. v.] and Hugh James Rose [q. v.] the traditions of the old high-church Anglicanism, to which he added much of the zeal and hopefulness of the Oxford movement, while his quaker blood and connections gave him broader and more evangelical sympathies. His Winchester life and its aspirations and successes are reflected in several books. His churchmanship was developed to its highest point in a sermon on ‘Evangelical Repentance’ (1841; with large appendix, 1842), in which he advocated the restoration of public penance. His teaching to the boys is given in an excellent confirmation manual, first published under the title ‘Catechetical Questions’ (1842, 1844), and afterwards as ‘Catechesis’ (1849); in ‘Three Sermons on Communion in Prayer’ (1843); and in the two volumes of ‘Christian Boyhood at a Public School,’ which collected his chief addresses to them (1846). A privately printed address suggested a closer relation of individual confidence. His enthusiasm for the old foundation is expressed in ‘The College of St. Mary, Winton, near Winchester’ (1848), a miscellaneous illustrated volume of great interest to Wykehamists.

Wordsworth's greatest success in scholarship was the production of a ‘Greek Grammar’ (‘Græce Grammaticæ Rudimenta’), which for a long time was the grammar almost everywhere in use in England ; and its accidence, at any rate, is still widely used. The accidence was published in January 1839, and the syntax apparently in 1843. Among his scholastic methods was the learning of Latin prose (Cicero) by heart by every boy. His own most remarkable production was the translation of Roundell Palmer's ‘Lines on the Four Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Foundation of Winchester College’ (1843), done into Greek trochaics in 1846. Admirable translations into Latin verse of Ken's morning, evening, and midnight hymns, and Keble's morning and evening hymns, were also printed for his friends and pupils in 1845. At the beginning of 1846 Wordsworth resigned his post at Winchester, partly on account of his father's failing health (he died on 2 Feb. 1846). In the spring he preached a farewell sermon and edited the two volumes of ‘Christian Boyhood.’

Shortly afterwards he accepted the offer made by his old pupil Gladstone of the wardenship of the new episcopalian Trinity college then being founded in Scotland. The scheme for founding this college, which was to be a training college for ordination candidates and a public school for boys, was first broached by James Hope and Gladstone in 1841, and was encouraged by Dean Ramsay in Edinburgh. Much money was collected