h in, or
a vote of, either house they can fashion the Church as they please.
Never did he speak with more point and power; and never did he seem
to have won more surely the entire sympathy of the house.

To gather in overwhelming numbers round him in the evening his
London clergy and their families, to meet them all with the kind
cordiality of a real father and friend, to run on far into the
middle of the night in this laborious endeavour to please--was "the
last effort of his toilsome day."

XXII

RETIREMENT OF THE PROVOST OF ORIEL[26]

[26]
_Guardian_, 4th November 1874.

Dr. Hawkins, the Provost of Oriel, has resigned the Provostship. He has
held it from 1828, within four years of half a century. The time during
which he has presided over his college has been one of the most
eventful periods in the history of the University; it has been a time
of revolt against custom, of reform, of keen conflict, of deep changes;
and in all connected with these he has borne a part, second to none in
prominence, in importance, and we must add, in dignity. No name of
equal distinction has disappeared from the list of Heads of Houses
since the venerable President of Magdalen passed away. But Dr. Routh,
though he watched with the keenest intelligence, and not without
sympathy, all that went on in the days into which his life had been
prolonged, watched it with the habits and thoughts of days long
departed; he had survived from the days of Bishop Horne and Dr. Parr
far into our new and strange century, to which he did not belong, and
he excited its interest as a still living example of what men were
before the French Revolution. The eminence of the Provost of Oriel is
of another kind. He calls forth interest because among all recent
generations of Oxford men, and in all their restless and exciting
movements, he has been a foremost figure. He belongs to modern Oxford,
its daring attempts, its fierce struggles, its successes, and its
failures. He was a man of whom not only every one heard, but whom every
one saw; for he was much in public, and his unsparing sense of public
duty made him regularly present in his place at Council, at
Convocation, at the University Church, at College chapel. The outward
look of Oxford will be altered by the disappearance in its ceremonies
and gatherings of his familiar form and countenance.

He would anywhere have been a remarkable man. His active and
independent mind, wit