Cardinal Manning had been the principal leader in the Oxford Debating Society till Mr. Gladstone appeared upon the scene. At once he and Gaskell became the leading Christ Church orators, and the great oratorical event of the time was Mr. Gladstone’s speech against the first Reform Bill. ‘Most of the speakers,’ writes Sir Francis Doyle, who was present on the occasion, ‘rose more or less above their ordinary level, but when Mr. Gladstone sat down we all of us felt that an epoch in our lives had arrived. It was certainly the finest speech of his that I ever heard. The effect produced by that great speech led to his being returned to Parliament as M.P. for Newark by the Tory Duke of Newcastle, who is remembered for his question, “May I not do what I like with my own?”’
To return to Mr. Gladstone’s career at the University. In 1831 he took a double first-class, and would easily have attained a Fellowship in any college where Fellowships depended upon a competitive examination. He held with Scott, the foremost scholar of the day, the second place in the Ireland for 1829. In that year a deputation from the Union of Cambridge went to Oxford to take part in a debate on the respective merits of Byron and Shelley. One of the Cambridge party was Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton. He writes: ‘The man that took me most was the youngest Gladstone, of Liverpool—I am sure a very superior person.’ On all he seems to have exercised a beneficial influence. He deprecated the example of the gentlemen commoners, and did much to check the pernicious habit prevalent at that time in the University, of over-indulgence in wine. His tutor was the Rev. Robert Briscoe. He also attended the lectures of the Rev. Dr. Benton on divinity and Dr. Pusey on Hebrew. He read classics privately with a tutor of the Bishop of St. Andrews. In 1830 he was at Cuddesdon Vicarage with a small reading-party, where he seems to have mastered Hooker’s ‘Ecclesiastical Polity.’ He founded and presided over an essay society called after his name, of which he was successively secretary and president. In his maiden speech at the Union in 1830 he defended Catholic emancipation; declared the Duke of Wellington’s Government unworthy of the confidence of the nation; opposed the removal of Jewish disabilities; and argued for the gradual emancipation of slavery rather than immediate abolition.
It is evident that all the time of his University career Mr. Gladstone had a profoundly religious bias, and at one time seems to have contemplated taking Holy Orders. Bishop Wordsworth declared that no man of his standing read the Bible more or knew it better. One of his fellow-students writes: ‘Poor Gladstone mixed himself up with the St. Mary Hall and Oriel set, who are really for the most part only fit to live with maiden aunts and keep tame rabbits.’ At this time Mr. Gladstone’s High Churchmanship does not seem to have been so pronounced as it afterwards became. He was a disciple of Canning, and rejoiced at Catholic emancipation. ‘When in Scotland, staying at his father’s house in Kincardineshire, he attended the Presbyterian Kirk zealously and contentedly, and took me with him,’ writes Sir Francis Doyle, ‘to what they call the “fencing of the tables,” an operation lasting five or six hours.’
One of Gladstone’s college acquaintances was Martin Tupper, whose ‘Proverbial Philosophy’ had a sale out of all proportion to its merits, in 1864. He wrote—
‘Orator, statesman, scholar, and sage,
The Crichton-more, the Gladstone of his age.’
‘My first acquaintance with Gladstone,’ Martin Tupper writes, ‘was a memorable event. It was at that time not so common a thing for undergraduates to go to the Communion at Christ Church Cathedral, that holy celebration being supposed to be for the particular benefit of Deans and Canons and Masters of Arts; so when two undergraduates went out of the chancel together after Communion, which they had both attended, it is small wonder that they addressed each other genially, in defiance of Oxford etiquette, nor that a friendship so well begun has continued to this hour.’ He testifies how Gladstone was the foremost man—warm-hearted, earnest, hard working, and religious, and had a following even in his teens.
The following anecdote is amusing. Tupper writes: ‘I had the honour at Christ Church of being prize-taker of Dr. Benton’s theological essay, “The Reconciliation of Matthew and John,” when Gladstone, who had also contested it, stood second, and when Dr. Benton had me before him to give me the twenty-five pounds’ worth of books, he requested me to allow Mr. Gladstone to have five pounds’ worth, as he was so good a second.’ Alas! Mr. Tupper in after-life was led to think that the man to whom at one time he looked up, had deviated from the proper path. In his ‘Three Hundred Sonnets,’ he kindly undertook, in the reference to Gladstone, to warn the public to
‘Beware of mere delusive eloquence.’
And again he wrote of a
‘Glozing tongue whom none can trust.’