have been moulded by them
who form the list of those "Orielenses," of whom it was said in an
academic squib of the time, with some truth, flavoured perhaps with a
spice of envy, that they were wont to enter the academic circle "under a
flourish of trumpets." Such a "flourish" certainly has often preceded
the entry of far lesser men than E. Coplestone, E. Hawkins, J. Davison,
J. Keble, R. Whately, T. Arnold, E.B. Pusey, J. H. Newman, H. Froude, R.
J. Wilberforce, S. Wilberforce, G. A. Denison, &c., &c.

Into a Society leavened with such intellectual influences as these, Dr.
Newman, soon after taking his degree, was ushered. It could at this time
have borne no distinctively devout character in its religious aspect.
Rather must it have been marked by the opposite of this. Whately, whose
powerful and somewhat rude intellect must almost have overawed the
common room when the might of Davison had been taken from it, was, with
all his varied excellences, never by any means an eminently devout,
scarcely perhaps an orthodox man. All his earlier writings bristle with
paradoxes, which affronted the instincts of simpler and more believing
minds. Whately, accordingly, appears in these pages as "generous and
warmhearted--particularly loyal to his friends" (p. 68); as teaching
his pupil "to see with my own eyes and to walk with my own feet"; yet as
exercising an influence over him (p. 69) which, "in a higher respect
than intellectual advance, had not been satisfactory," under which he
"was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral, was drifting
in the direction of liberalism"; a "dream" out of which he was "rudely
awakened at the end of 1827, by two great blows--illness and
bereavement" (p. 72).

Though this change in his views is traced by Dr. Newman to the action of
these strictly personal causes of illness and bereavement, yet other
influences, we suspect, were working strongly in the same direction. It
is plain that, so far as regards early permanent impression on the
character of his religious opinions, the influence of Whately was
calculated rather to stir up reaction than to win a convert. "Whately's
mind," he says himself (p. 68), "was too different from mine for us to
remain long on one line." The course of events round him impelled him in
the same direction, and furnished him with new comrades, on whom
henceforth he was to act, and who were to react most powerfully on him.
The torrent of reform was beginning its