To an almost unknown degree, Oriel had at that time monopolised the active speculative intellect of Oxford.  Her fellowships being open, whilst those of other Colleges were closed, drew to her the ablest men of the University:  whilst the nature of the examination for her fellowships, which took no note of ordinary University honours, and stretched boldly out beyond inquiries as to classical and mathematical attainments in everything which could test the dormant powers of the candidates, had already impressed upon the Society a distinctive character of intellectual excellence.  The late Lord Grenville used at this time to term an Oriel Fellowship the Blue Ribbon of the University; and, undoubtedly, the results of those examinations have been marvellously confirmed by the event, if we think to what an extent the mind, and opinions, and thoughts of England have been moulded by them who form the list of those “Orielenses,” of whom it was said in an academic squib of the time, with some truth, flavoured perhaps with a spice of envy, that they were wont to enter the academic circle “under a flourish of trumpets.”  Such a “flourish” certainly has often preceded the entry of far lesser men than E. Coplestone, E. Hawkins, J. Davison, J. Keble, R. Whately, T. Arnold, E.B.  Pusey, J. H. Newman, H. Froude, R. J. Wilberforce, S. Wilberforce, G. A. Denison, &c., &c.

Into a Society leavened with such intellectual influences as these, Dr. Newman, soon after taking his degree, was ushered.  It could at this time have borne no distinctively devout character in its religious aspect.  Rather must it have been marked by the opposite of this.  Whately, whose powerful and somewhat rude intellect must almost have overawed the common room when the might of Davison had been taken from it, was, with all his varied excellences, never by any means an eminently devout, scarcely perhaps an orthodox man.  All his earlier writings bristle with paradoxes, which affronted the instincts of simpler and more believing minds.  Whately, accordingly, appears in these pages as “generous and warmhearted—­particularly loyal to his friends” (p. 68); as teaching his pupil “to see with my own eyes and to walk with my own feet”; yet as exercising an influence over him (p. 69) which, “in a higher respect than intellectual advance, had not been satisfactory,” under which he “was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral, was drifting in the direction of liberalism”; a “dream” out of which he was “rudely awakened at the end of 1827, by two great blows—­illness and bereavement” (p. 72).

Though this change in his views is traced by Dr. Newman to the action of these strictly personal causes of illness and bereavement, yet other influences, we suspect, were working strongly in the same direction.  It is plain that, so far as regards early permanent impression on the character of his religious opinions, the influence of Whately was calculated rather to stir up reaction than to win a convert.  “Whately’s