are upon me. Why will you not let me die in peace? Wounded
brutes creep into some hole to die in, and no one grudges it them.
Let me alone, I shall not trouble you long. This was the keen heavy
feeling which pierced me, and, I think, these are the very words that
I used to myself. I asked, in the words of a great motto, "Ubi
lapsus? quid feci?" One day when I entered my house, I found a flight
of undergraduates inside. Heads of houses, as mounted patrols, walked
their horses round those poor cottages. Doctors of divinity dived
into the hidden recesses of that private tenement uninvited, and drew
domestic conclusions from what they saw there. I had thought that an
Englishman's house was his castle; but the newspapers thought
otherwise, and at last the matter came before my good Bishop. I
insert his letter, and a portion of my reply to him:--

"April 12, 1842. So many of the charges against yourself and your
friends which I have seen in the public journals have been, within my
own knowledge, false and calumnious, that I am not apt to pay much
attention to what is asserted with respect to you in the newspapers.

"In a" [newspaper], "however, of April 9, there appears a paragraph
in which it is asserted, as a matter of notoriety, that a 'so-called
Anglo-Catholic Monastery is in process of erection at Littlemore, and
that the cells of dormitories, the chapel, the refectory, the
cloisters all may be seen advancing to perfection, under the eye of a
Parish Priest of the Diocese of Oxford.'

"Now, as I have understood that you really are possessed of some
tenements at Littlemore--as it is generally believed that they are
destined for the purposes of study and devotion--and as much
suspicion and jealousy are felt about the matter, I am anxious to
afford you an opportunity of making me an explanation on the subject.

"I know you too well not to be aware that you are the last man living
to attempt in my Diocese a revival of the Monastic orders (in
anything approaching to the Romanist sense of the term) without
previous communication with me--or indeed that you should take upon
yourself to originate any measure of importance without authority
from the heads of the Church--and therefore I at once exonerate you
from the accusation brought against you by the newspaper I have
quoted, but I feel it nevertheless a duty to my Diocese and myself,
as well as to you, to ask you to put it in my power to contradict
what, if uncontradicted,