‘There was Tennyson, the Laureate, whose goodly bay-tree decorates our language and our land; Arthur, the younger Hallam, the subject of _In Memoriam_, the poet and his friend passing, linked hand in hand, together down the slopes of fame. There was Trench, the present Archbishop of Dublin, and Alford, Dean of Canterbury, both profound Scriptural philologists who have not disdained the secular muse. There was Spedding, who has, by a philosophical affinity, devoted the whole of his valuable life to the rehabilitation of the character of Lord Bacon; and there was Merivale, who—I hope by some attraction of repulsion—has devoted so much learning to the vindication of the Cæsars. There were Kemble and Kinglake, the historian of our earliest civilization and of our latest war—Kemble as interesting an individual as ever was portrayed by the dramatic genius of his own race; Kinglake, as bold a man-at-arms in literature as ever confronted public opinion. There was Venables, whose admirable writings, unfortunately anonymous, we are reading every day, without knowing to whom to attribute them; and there was Blakesley, the “Hertfordshire Incumbent” of the _Times_. There were sons of families which seemed to have an hereditary right to, a sort of habit of, academic distinction, like the Heaths and the Lushingtons. But I must check this throng of advancing memories, and I will pass from this point with the mention of two names which you would not let me omit—one of them, that of your Professor of Greek, whom it is the honour of Her Majesty’s late Government to have made Master of Trinity; and the other, that of your latest Professor, Mr F. D. Maurice, in whom you will all soon recognize the true enthusiasm of humanity’ (vol. ii. p. 161).
Mr Reid tells us that Tennyson sought Milnes’s acquaintance because ‘he looks the best-tempered fellow I ever saw.’ Hallam proclaimed him to be ‘a kindhearted fellow, as well as a very clever one, but vain and paradoxical.’ Milnes himself put Hallam at the head of those whom he knew. ‘He is the only man of my standing,’ he wrote, ‘before whom I bow in conscious inferiority in everything.’
It was hardly to be expected that Milnes, with his taste for the general in literature rather than the particular, would achieve distinction in the Cambridge of 1830. We have seen how Thirlwall disposed of his classical aspirations, and in mathematics he fared no better. He read hard, and hoped for distinction in the college examination. But he had overtaxed his energies; his health gave way, and he was forced to give up work altogether for some days. Happily, the benefit a man derives from his three years at a university need not be measured by his honours, and we may be sure that the experience of men and books that Milnes gained there was of greater service to him than a high place in any Tripos would have been. He roamed in all directions over the fields of knowledge; phrenology, anatomy, geology, political economy, metaphysics, by turns engaged his attention; he dabbled in periodical literature; he acted Beatrice in _Much Ado about Nothing_, and Mrs Malaprop in _The Rivals_; he made an excursion in a balloon with the celebrated aeronaut, Mr Green; he wrote two prize-poems, _Timbuctoo_ and _Byzantium_, but only to be beaten by Tennyson and Kinglake; he obtained a second prize for an English declamation, and a first prize for an English essay, _On the Homeric Poems_; he became a member of the club known as ‘The Apostles,’ in which he maintained a kindly interest to the end of his life; and last, but by no means least, he was a constant speaker at the Union.