proposal of the Board to be formed and expressed. Leading men in London, Mr. Gladstone among them, were clear that it was an occasion for the exercise of the joint veto with which the Proctors were invested. The veto was intended, if for anything, to save the University from inconsiderate and hasty measures; and seldom, except in revolutionary times, had so momentous and so unexpected a measure been urged on with such unseemly haste. The feeling of the younger Liberals, Mr. Stanley, Mr. Donkin, Mr. Jowett, Dr. Greenhill, was in the same direction. On the 10th of February the Proctors announced to the Board their intention to veto the third proposal. But of course the thing went forward. The Proctors were friends of Mr. Newman, and the Heads believed that this would counterbalance any effect from their act of authority. It is possible that the announcement may have been regarded as a mere menace, too audacious to be fulfilled. On the 13th of February, amid slush and snow, Convocation met in the Theatre. Mr. Ward asked leave to defend himself in English, and occupied one of the rostra, usually devoted to the recital of prize poems and essays. He spoke with vigour and ability, dividing his speech, and resting in the interval between the two portions in the rostrum.1 There was no other address, and the voting began. The first vote, the condemnation of the book, was

1 It is part of the history of the time, that during those anxious days, Mr. Ward was engaged to be married. The engagement came to the knowledge of his friends, to their great astonishment and amusement, very soon after the events in the Theatre.

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carried by 777 to 386. The second, by a more evenly balanced division, 569 to 511. When the Vice-Chancellor put the third, the Proctors rose, and the senior Proctor, Mr. Guillemard of Trinity, stopped it in the words, Nobis procuratoribus non placet. Such a step, of course, only suspended the vote, and the year of office of these Proctors was nearly run. But they had expressed the feeling of those whom they represented. It was shown not only in a largelysigned address of thanks. All attempts to revive the decree at the expiration of their year of office failed. The wiser heads in the Hebdomadal Board recognised at last that they had better hold their hand. Mistakes men may commit, and defeats they may undergo, and yet lose nothing that concerns their character for acting as men of a high standard ought to act. But in this case, mistakes and defeat were the least of what the Board brought on themselves. This was the last act of a long and deliberately pursued course of conduct; and if it was the last, it was because it was the upshot and climax, and neither the University nor any one else would endure that it should go on any longer. The proposed attack on Mr. Newman betrayed how helpless they were, and to what paltry acts of worrying it was, in their judgment, right and judicious to condescend. It gave a measure of their statesmanship, wisdom, and good feeling in defending the interests of the Church; and it made a very deep and lasting impression on all who were interested in the honour and welfare of Oxford. Men must have

blinded themselves to the plainest effects of their own actions who could have laid themselves open to such a description of their conduct as is contained in the following extract from a paper of the time-a passage of which the indignant and pathetic undertone reflected the indignation and the sympathy of hundreds of men of widely differing opinions.

The vote is an answer to a cry-that cry is one of dishonesty, and this dishonesty the proposed resolution, as plainly as it dares to say anything, insinuates. On this part of the question, those who have ever been honoured by Mr. Newman's friendship must feel it dangerous to allow themselves thus to speak. And yet they must speak; for no one else can appreciate it as truly as they do. When they see the person whom they have been accustomed to revere as few men are revered, whose labours, whose greatness, whose tenderness, whose singleness and holiness of purpose, they have been permitted to know intimately-not allowed even the poor privilege of satisfying, by silence and retirement by the relinquishment of preferment, position, and influence—the persevering hostility of persons whom they cannot help comparing with him—not permitted even to submit in peace to those irregular censures, to which he seems to have been even morbidly alive, but dragged forth to suffer an oblique and tardy condemnation; called again to account for matters now long ago accounted for; on which a judgment has been pronounced, which, whatever others may think of it, he at least has accepted as conclusive-when they contrast his merits, his submission, his treatment, which they see and know,

with the merits, the bearing, the fortunes of those who are doggedly pursuing him, it does become very difficult to speak without sullying what it is a kind of pleasure to feel is his cause by using hard words, or betraying it by not using them. It is too difficult to speak, as ought to be spoken, of this ungenerous and gratuitous afterthought-too difficult to keep clear of what, at least, will be thought exaggeration; too difficult to do justice to what they feel to be undoubtedly true; and I will not attempt to say more than enough to mark an opinion which ought to be plainly avowed, as to the nature of this procedure.1

1 From a Short Appeal to Members of Convocation on the proposed Censure on No. 90. By Frederic Rogers, Fellow of Oriel. (Dated Saturday, 8th of February 1845.)

CHAPTER XIX

THE CATASTROPHE

The

THE events of February were a great shock. routine of Oxford had been broken as it had never been broken by the fiercest strifes before. Condemnations had been before passed on opinions, and even on persons. But to see an eminent man, of blameless life, a fellow of one of the first among the Colleges, solemnly deprived of his degree and all that the degree carried with it, and that on a charge in which bad faith and treachery were combined with alleged heresy, was a novel experience, where the kindnesses of daily companionship and social intercourse still asserted themselves as paramount to official ideas of position. And when, besides this, people realised what more had been attempted, and by how narrow a chance a still heavier blow had been averted from one towards whom so many hearts warmed, how narrowly a yoke had been escaped which would have seemed to subject all religious thought in the University to the caprice or the blind zeal of a partisan official, the sense