192 PRÆTERITA-I

of their temple. Every man in his place, according to his rank, age, and learning; every man of sense or heart there recognizing that he was either fulfilling, or being prepared to fulfil, the gravest duties required of Englishmen. A well-educated foreigner, admitted to that morning service, might have learned and judged more quickly and justly what the country had been, and still had power to be, than by months of stay in court or city. There, in his stall, sat the greatest divine of England,¹-under his commandant niche, her greatest scholar,²-among the tutors the present Dean Liddell, and a man of curious intellectual power and simple virtue, Osborne Gordon.³ The group of noblemen gave, in the Marquis of Kildare, Earl of Desart, Earl of Emlyn, and Francis Charteris, now Lord Wemyss,⁴-the brightest types of high race and active power. Henry Acland and Charles Newton among the senior undergraduates, and I among the freshmen, showed, if one had known it, elements of curious possibilities in coming days. None of us then conscious of any need or chance of change, least of all the stern captain, who, with rounded brow and glittering dark eye, led in his old thunderous Latin the responses of the morning prayer.

For all that I saw, and was made to think, in that cathedral choir, I am most thankful to this day.

220. The influence on me of the next goodliest part of the college buildings,-the hall,-was of a different and curiously mixed character. Had it only been used, as it only ought to have been, for festivity and magnificence,-

¹ [Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882), Regius Professor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church.]

² [Dean Gaisford (1779-1855), Regius Professor of Greek.]

³ [See below, p. 249.]

⁴ [Charles William FitzGerald, Marquis of Kildare, M.P. for Kildare, 1847-1852; succeeded as fourth Duke of Leinster, 1874; died 1874.

Otway O’Connor Cuffe, third Earl of Desart (1818-1865), M.P. for Ipswich, 1842; a representative peer of Ireland, 1846.

“Earl of Emlyn” must be a mistake for Viscount Emlyn (1817-1898), who succeeded his father as second Earl Cawdor, 1860; M.P. for Pembrokeshire, 1841-1860.

Francis Charteris, Lord Elcho, succeeded as ninth Earl of Wemyss, 1883; see further, below, p. 208.]

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