And yet again:—
"It was well when the winning-card fell into their hands, for then there was just a chance of some dressmaker or tradesman being paid something on account before becoming bankrupt. With such examples of the misuse of wealth before their eyes, it was a wonder there were not more Socialists than there actually were."
All the memories of my youth have been revived by Father Vaughan. Instead of 1906, 1876; instead of the Gothic gloom of Farm Street, the tawdry glare of St. Peter's, Eaton Square; instead of a Jesuit Father in the pulpit, a vigorous Protestant who renounces the Pope and all his works and glories in the Anglicanism of the Church of England. Grant those differences, which after all are more incidental than essential, and the sermons exactly reproduce those stirring days when the present Bishop of St. Andrews "shook the arsenal" of fashion, "thundered over" London, and achieved, as his admirers said, the supreme distinction of spoiling the London Season.
I am convinced that the Higher Critics of a later age, collating the Wilkinsonian tradition with such fragments as remain of Father Vaughan's discourses, will come to the conclusion that "Wilkinson" never existed (except in Wordsworth's ode to the Spade), but was a kind of heroic figure conceived by a much later generation, which had quivered under the rhetoric of a real person or persons called Vaughan; and the opinion of the learned will be sharply divided on such questions as whether Vaughan was one or many; if one, whether he was a Priest, a Cardinal, a Head Master, or an Independent Minister; or whether he was all four at different stages of his career.
XII
OXFORD
"Once, my dear—but the world was young then—
Magdalen elms and Trinity limes,—
Lissom the oars and backs that swung then,
Eight good men in the good old times—