Among famous men nurtured at this College were Raleigh, Prynne, Bishop Butler, and Gilbert White, the naturalist; but it was in the first half of the nineteenth century that Oriel's intellectual renown was at its highest. To recall the names of Pusey, Keble, Newman, Whately, and Thomas Arnold suffices to indicate the subject which most preoccupied the Oxford of that epoch. Oriel seemed fated to be the seat of religious controversy, from the seventeenth century days of Provost Walter Hodges, whose Elihu, a treatise on the Book of Job, brought him into suspicion of favouring the sect of Hutchinsonians. Happily there was some tincture of humour in the differences of those days. When this Provost resented the imputation, his detractors told him that a writer on the Book of Job should take everything with patience. Controversy apart, any College might be proud of a group of Fellows of whom one became an archbishop, another a really great headmaster, and a third a cardinal. Oriel has had poets, too, within her gates, for in a later day Clough and Matthew Arnold won fellowships here.
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But Oriel has had no more dutiful son, if liberality is any measure of dutifulness, than Cecil Rhodes. It is too soon to appraise the value of his scholarship scheme, which provides an Oxford education for numerous colonial and foreign students; but his old College, which benefited so largely by the provisions of his will, can have no hesitation in including him among its benefactors.