e Dedication Festival of 1872, there was a strong list of
preachers, including W. J. E. Bennett, of Frome, and Edward King, then
Principal of Cuddesdon. But the sermon which made an indelible
impression on me was preached by R. W. Randall, then vicar of All
Saints, Clifton, and afterwards Dean of Chichester. It was indeed a
memorable performance. "Performance" is the right word, for, young as
one was, one realized instinctively the wonderful art and mastery and
technical perfection of the whole. There was the exquisitely modulated
voice, sinking lower, yet becoming more distinct, whenever any specially
moving topic was touched; the restrained, yet emphatic action--I can see
that uplifted forefinger still--and the touch of personal reminiscence
at the close, so managed as to give the sense that we were listening to
an elder brother who, thirty years before, had passed through the same
experiences, so awfully intermingled of hope and tragedy, which now lay
before us on the threshold of our Oxford life. It was, in brief, a
sermon never to be forgotten; it was "a night to be much remembered unto
the Lord."

Some thirty years later, I was introduced to Dean Randall at a London
dinner-party. After dinner, I drew my chair towards him, and said, "Mr.
Dean, I have always wished to have an opportunity of thanking you for a
sermon which you preached at St. Barnabas', Oxford, at the Dedication
Festival, 1872." The Dean smiled, with the graceful pleasure of an old
man honoured by a younger one, and said, "Yes? What was the text?" "The
text I have long forgotten, but I remember the subject." "And what was
that?" "It was the insecurity of even the best-founded hopes." "Rather a
well-worn theme," said the Dean, with a half-smile. "But not, sir," I
said, "as you handled it. You told us, at the end of the sermon, that
you remembered a summer afternoon when you were an undergraduate at
Christ Church, and were sitting over your Thucydides close to your
window, grappling with a long and complicated passage which was to be
the subject of next morning's lecture; and that, glancing for a moment
from your book, you saw the two most brilliant young Christ Church men
of the day going down to bathe in the Isis. You described the gifts and
graces of the pair, who, between them, seemed to combine all that was
best and most beautiful in body and mind and soul. And then you told us
how, as your friends disappeared towards Christ Church Meadows, you
re