of the occurrence when next they met, Westbury said, “I felt inclined to say, ’Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?’” The Bishop in relating this used to say, “I never in my life was so tempted as to finish the quotation, and say, ’Yea, I have found thee, because thou hast sold thyself to work iniquity.’  But by a great effort I kept it down, and said, ’Does your lordship remember the end of the quotation?’” The Bishop, who enjoyed a laugh against himself, used to say that he had once been effectually scored off by one of his clergy whom he had rebuked for his addiction to fox-hunting.  The Bishop urged that it had a worldly appearance.  The clergyman replied that it was not a bit more worldly than a ball at Blenheim Palace at which the Bishop had been present.  The Bishop explained that he was staying in the house, but was never within three rooms of the dancing.  “Oh, if it comes to that,” replied the clergyman, “I never am within three fields of the hounds.”

One of the best replies—­it is scarcely a repartee—­traditionally reported at Oxford was made by the great Saint of the Tractarian Movement, the Rev. Charles Marriott.  A brother-Fellow of Oriel had behaved rather outrageously at dinner overnight, and coming out of chapel next morning, essayed to apologize to Marriott:  “My friend, I’m afraid I made rather a fool of myself last night.”  “My dear fellow, I assure you I observed nothing unusual.”

In a former chapter about the Art of Conversation I referred to the singular readiness which characterized Lord Sherbrooke’s talk.  A good instance of it was his reply to the strenuous advocate of modern studies, who, presuming on Sherbrooke’s sympathy, said, “I have the greatest contempt for Aristotle.”  “But not that contempt which familiarity breeds, I should imagine,” was Sherbrooke’s mild rejoinder.  “I have got a box at the Lyceum to-night,” I once heard a lady say, “and a place to spare.  Lord Sherbrooke, will you come?  If you are engaged, I must take the Bishop of Gibraltar.”  “Oh, that’s no good.  Gibraltar can never be taken.”

In 1872, when University College, Oxford, celebrated the thousandth anniversary of its foundation, Lord Sherbrooke, as an old Member of the College, made the speech of the evening.  His theme was a complaint of the iconoclastic tendency of New Historians.  Nothing was safe from their sacrilegious research.  Every tradition, however venerable, however precious, was resolved into a myth or a fable.  “For example,” he said, “we have always believed that certain lands which this college owns in Berkshire were given to us by King Alfred.  Now the New Historians come and tell us that this could not have been the case, because they can prove that the lands in question never belonged to the King.  It seems to me that the New Historians prove too much—­indeed, they prove the very point which they contest.  If the lands had belonged to the King, he would probably have kept them to himself; but as they belonged to some one else, he made a handsome present of them to the College.”