A touch of vertigo bewilders us as we try to follow the Professor through the maze of interwoven activities which he so nimbly threaded during these years. We enter upon a period of cession to the interest of the moment, of suspense from concentrated effort, of varied study, of enjoyment, acquisition, expansion. The pressure of life had relaxed for a time; Commissions and Parliaments relieved him from the strain of lifting up his voice in the unredeemed wilderness of education; he scarcely cared to swell the chorus, the burden of whose song he had manfully raised. For some years, therefore, we are concerned with a multitude of matters, important and purposely useful, but demanding no longer the strenuous heroism of earlier tasks. Something of abandonment to personal enjoyment may be discovered in this period, involving work, social life, travel, and study in temperate proportions.

The level is broken by one stirring enterprise, to which he was impelled partly by circumstances, partly by the influence of his summer studies, ungoaded by professional demands. These had necessarily supplied much of the stimulus to his Æschylean and Homeric labours, but their claims were satisfied, and he was free—in his own words—“to let things take their natural course.”

The Franco-German war of 1870–71 engaged his interest to a degree seldom effected by political occurrences, which he generally disregarded. Two impulses accounted for this, both personal to himself. These were the fighting instinct, which in his case was rather mental than physical, and the part which German influence had played in his education. War was always attractive to him, whether past or present.