er, Burgon, Scott Holland, Illingworth, Ottley,
Lacey, Gore, and Jayne, now Bishop of Chester; but it was not
long-lived. Very soon the "Victorian Persecution," as we used to call
it, engineered by Archbishop Tait through the P.W.R. Act, made it
difficult for ritualists to feel that they had part or lot with those
who were imprisoning conscientious clergymen; so the O.U.C.S. fell to
pieces and disappeared, to be revived after long years and under more
peaceable conditions, by the present Archbishop of York, when Vicar of
St. Mary's.
The accession of Dr. King to the Pastoral Professorship brought a new
element of social delight into the ecclesiastical world of Oxford, and
that was just what was wanted. We revered our leaders, but saw little of
them. Dr. Pusey was buried in Christ Church; and though there were some
who fraudulently professed to be students of Hebrew, in order that they
might see him (and sketch him) at his lectures, most of us only heard
him in the pulpit of St. Mary's. It was rather fun to take ritualistic
ladies, who had fashioned mental pictures of the great Tractarian, to
Evensong in Christ Church, and to watch their dismay as that very
unascetic figure, with tumbled surplice and hood awry, toddled to his
stall. "Dear me! Is that Dr. Pusey? Somehow I had fancied quite a
different-looking man." Liddon was now a Canon of St. Paul's, and his
home was at Amen Court; so, when residing at Oxford, he lived a sort of
hermit-life in his rooms in Christ Church, and did not hold much
communication with undergraduates. I have lively recollections of eating
a kind of plum duff on Fridays at the Mission-House of Cowley, while one
of the Fathers read passages from Tertullian on the remarriage of
widows; but this, though edifying, was scarcely social.
But the arrival of "Canon King," with the admirable mother who kept
house for him, was like a sunrise. All those notions of austerity and
stiffness and gloom which had somehow clung about Tractarianism were
dispelled at once by his fun and sympathy and social tact. Under his
roof, undergraduates always felt happy and at home; and in his "Bethel,"
as he called it, a kind of disused greenhouse in his garden, he
gathered week by week a band of undergraduate hearers, to whom religion
spoke, through his lips, with her most searching yet most persuasive
accent.
Lovers of _Friendship's Garland_ will remember that, during their three
years at Oxford, Lord Lumpington and E
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