The death of the Master of Trinity College has severed almost the last of the links which connect the present life of Cambridge with the past. From 1828 until his death[114] in 1886 his connexion with his college was unbroken; for a brief absence soon after his election to a Fellowship, and the periods of canonical residence at Ely need hardly be taken into account. He was, therefore, up to a certain point, a typical Trinity man of the older school; a firm believer in the greatness of his college, and in the obligation laid upon him personally to increase that greatness by every means in his power. But he did not admire blindly. He could recognize, if he did not welcome, the necessity for changes in the old order from time to time; and he was known throughout the best period of his intellectual life as a Liberal and a reformer. He was a rare combination of a student without pedantry, and a man of the world without foppishness, or want of principle.
As an undergraduate he was fortunate in obtaining the friendship of men who afterwards became celebrated in the world of letters, most of them members of that famous coterie of which Tennyson and Hallam were the most notable figures. Indeed it is not impossible that the poet may have intended to include Thompson himself among those who
“held debate, a band Of youthful friends, on mind and art And labour, and the changing mart, And all the framework of the land.”
In their society he laid the foundation of that wide knowledge of literature, that keen interest in whatever was going forward, that habit of weighing all things in the nicely-adjusted balance of thoughtful criticism, which made what he wrote so valuable, and what he said so delightful. Nor, after he had obtained his Fellowship, and was free to do as he liked, was he content to become a student and nothing more. He was careful to add a knowledge of men and manners to what he was learning from books. He travelled abroad, and acquired a competent knowledge of more than one modern language; he was fond of art, and a good judge of pictures and sculpture. Nor did he forget the friends of his undergraduate days. He was a welcome, and we believe a frequent, guest at their houses both in town and country, where his fine presence, his courteous bearing, and his quiet, epigrammatic conversation were keenly appreciated. To the influence of these social surroundings he owed that absence of narrowness which is inseparable from a University career, if it be not tempered by influences from the outside.