m secretumque
Mouseion."

If there be a place in this busy island which may distract the
passion of youth from love to scholarship, to Ritualism, to mediaeval
associations, to that sort of poetical sentiment or poetical fanaticism
which a Mivers and a Welby and an advocate of the Realistic School would
hold in contempt,--certainly that place is Oxford,--home; nevertheless,
of great thinkers and great actors in the practical world.

The vacation had not yet commenced, but the commencement was near at
hand. Kenelm thought he could recognize the leading men by their slower
walk and more abstracted expression of countenance. Among the Fellows
was the eminent author of that book which had so powerfully fascinated
the earlier adolescence of Kenelm Chillingly, and who had himself been
subject to the fascination of a yet stronger spirit. The Rev. Decimus
Roach had been ever an intense and reverent admirer of John Henry
Newman,--an admirer, I mean, of the pure and lofty character of the
man, quite apart from sympathy with his doctrines. But although Roach
remained an unconverted Protestant of orthodox, if High Church, creed,
yet there was one tenet he did hold in common with the author of the
"Apologia." He ranked celibacy among the virtues most dear to Heaven.
In that eloquent treatise, "The Approach to the Angels," he not only
maintained that the state of single blessedness was strictly incumbent
on every member of a Christian priesthood, but to be commended to the
adoption of every conscientious layman.

It was the desire to confer with this eminent theologian that had
induced Kenelm to direct his steps to Oxford.

Mr. Roach was a friend of Welby, at whose house, when a pupil,
Kenelm had once or twice met him, and been even more charmed by his
conversation than by his treatise.

Kenelm called on Mr. Roach, who received him very graciously, and, not
being a tutor or examiner, placed his time at Kenelm's disposal; took
him the round of the colleges and the Bodleian; invited him to dine in
his college-hall; and after dinner led him into his own rooms, and gave
him an excellent bottle of Chateau Margeaux.

Mr. Roach was somewhere about fifty,--a good-looking man and evidently
thought himself so; for he wore his hair long behind and parted in the
middle, which is not done by men who form modest estimates of their
personal appearance.

Kenelm was not long in drawing out his host on the subject to which that
profound thinke