that important day
on which the great go of all was to be undergone. They both belonged
to the same debating society at Oxford, and though they thought very
differently on most important subjects, they remained, with some few
temporary interruptions, fast friends through their four years of
Oxford residence.

There were periods when the Balliol man was considered by his friends
to run a better chance of academical success than his brighter cousin
at Trinity. Wilkinson worked hard during his three first years, and
Bertram did not. The style of mind, too, of the former was the more
adapted to win friends at Oxford. In those days the Tracts were new,
and read by everybody, and what has since been called Puseyism was in
its robust infancy. Wilkinson proclaimed himself, while yet little
more than a boy, to be an admirer of poor Froude and a follower of
Newman. Bertram, on the other hand, was unsparing in his ridicule
of the "Remains," set himself in full opposition to the Sewells,
and came out as a poet--successfully, as far as the Newdegate was
concerned--in direct opposition to Keble and Faber.

For three years Wilkinson worked hard and regularly; but the _eclat_
attending on his success somewhat injured him. In his fourth year,
or, at any rate, in the earlier part of it, he talked more than he
read, and gave way too much to the delights of society--too much, at
least, for one who was so poor, and to whom work was so necessary. He
could not keep his position by dint of genius, as Bertram might do;
consequently, though he was held to have taken honours in taking his
degree, he missed the high position at which he had aimed; and on the
day which enabled him to write himself bachelor of arts, he was in
debt to the amount of a couple of hundred pounds, a sum which it was
of course utterly out of his power to pay, and nearly as far out of
the power of his father.

It had always been Bertram's delight to study in such a manner that
men should think he did not study. There was an affectation in this,
perhaps not uncommon to men of genius, but which was deleterious to
his character--as all affectations are. It was, however, the fact,
that during the last year before his examination, he did study hard.
There was a set round him at his college among whom he was esteemed
as a great man--a little sect of worshippers, who looked for their
idol to do great things; and it was a point of honour with them to
assist this pretence of his