Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/207

 can deny the exceptional beauty of very many of them—Darby’s are unequalled (I had almost said unapproached) for depth, force and grandeur; though Darby put himself at a serious disadvantage (especially in comparison with so exquisitely graceful a writer as Sir Edward Denny) by his involved and uncouth style of composition.

I have often heard people who were not blind to Darby’s faults say with immense emphasis, “He was a great man”. If a magnanimous simplicity makes a man great, they were right. He might be a scholar, but he wore none of a scholar’s trappings; he might be supreme in his own little world, but his habitual bearing showed no trace of self-consciousness. To his social inferiors and to young men he was genial and hearty, and he kept his well-known brusquerie for more influential people, and especially for his sycophants—who were many. If he was ruthless in his ecclesiastical conflicts, he had at other times a singularly kindly and sympathetic nature. In the act of addressing a meeting he would roll up his greatcoat as a pillow for a sleeping child whose uncomfortable attitude had struck him. I have heard that, on one of his numerous voyages, he might have been seen pacing the deck all night with a restless child in his arms, in order to afford the worn-out mother an opportunity of rest; and I doubt whether many children were more tenderly nursed that night. The incident is the more interesting for the fact that Darby was never married. Was it the breaking forth of this tenderness, deep-hidden in his lonely heart, that bound men to him in so pathetic a fidelity of devotion?

In the hills of Eastern France or of Switzerland he would often on his pastoral tours receive the hospitality of humble mountaineers. When the materfamilias went out to her work in the fields, half his active mind would