To His majesty and power,
Telling prayers with punctual service, summers, centuries, how long?
The beads upon our rosary of immemorial song."
The Minstrelsy of Isis.
Oxford is a subject from which one cannot easily tear oneself: so I make no apology for returning to it. In that delightful book, "The Minstrelsy of Isis," I have found an anonymous poem beginning
"Royal heart, loyal heart, comrade that I loved,"
and, in the spirit of that line, I dedicate this chapter to the friend whom I always regarded as the Ideal Undergraduate.[17] Other names and other faces of contemporaries and companions come crowding upon the memory, but it is better, on all accounts, to leave them unspecified. I lived quite as much in other colleges as in my own, and in a fellowship which was gathered from all sorts and sections of undergraduate life. Let the reader imagine all the best and brightest men in the University between 1872 and 1876, and he will not go far wrong in assuming that my friends were among them.
My Oxford life was cut sharply into two halves by a very definite dividing-line; the first half was cheerful and irresponsible enough. A large part of the cheerfulness was connected with the Church, and my earliest friendships (after those which I brought with me from Harrow) were formed in the circle which frequented St. Barnabas. I am thankful to remember that my eyes were even then open to see the moral beauty and goodness all around me, and I had a splendid dream of blending it all into one. In my second term I founded an "Oxford University Church Society," designed to unite religious undergraduates of all shades of Churchmanship for common worship and interchange of views. We formed ourselves on what we heard of a similar Society at Cambridge; and, early in the Summer Term of 1873, a youth of ruddy countenance and graceful address—now Canon Mason and Master of Pembroke—came over from Cambridge, and told us how to set to work. The effort was indeed well-meant. It was blessed by Churchmen as dissimilar as Bishop Mackarness, Edwin Palmer, Burgon, Scott Holland, Illingworth, Ottley, Lacey, Gore, and Jayne, now Bishop of Chester; but it was not long-lived. Very soon the "Victorian Persecution," as we used to call it, engineered by Archbishop Tait through the P.W.R. Act, made it difficult for ritualists to feel that they had part or lot with those who were imprisoning conscientious clergymen; so the O.U.C.S. fell to pieces and disappeared, to be revived after long years and under more peaceable conditions, by the present Archbishop of York, when Vicar of St. Mary's.
The accession of Dr. King to the Pastoral Professorship brought a new element of social delight into the ecclesiastical world of Oxford, and that was just what was wanted. We revered our leaders, but saw little of them. Dr. Pusey was buried in Christ Church; and though there were some who fraudulently professed to be students of Hebrew, in order that they might see him (and sketch him) at his lectures, most of us only heard him in the pulpit of St. Mary's. It was rather fun to take ritualistic ladies, who had fashioned mental pictures of the great Tractarian, to Evensong in Christ Church, and to watch their dismay as that very unascetic figure, with tumbled surplice and hood awry, toddled to his stall. "Dear me! Is that Dr. Pusey? Somehow I had fancied quite a different-looking man." Liddon was now a Canon of St. Paul's, and his home was at Amen Court; so, when residing at Oxford, he lived a sort of hermit-life in his rooms in Christ Church, and did not hold much communication with undergraduates. I have lively recollections of eating a kind of plum duff on Fridays at the Mission-House of Cowley, while one of the Fathers read passages from Tertullian on the remarriage of widows; but this, though edifying, was scarcely social.
But the arrival of "Canon King," with the admirable mother who kept house for him, was like a sunrise. All those notions of austerity and stiffness and gloom which had somehow clung about Tractarianism were dispelled at once by his fun and sympathy and social tact. Under his roof, undergraduates always felt happy and at home; and in his "Bethel," as he called it, a kind of disused greenhouse in his garden, he gathered week by week a band of undergraduate hearers, to whom religion spoke, through his lips, with her most searching yet most persuasive accent.