hour the charm was at work.  How joyous, how enticing, the welcome, the glad brotherhood!  So warm and loving it all seemed, as we thought of the sharp skirmishing of our talk in College; so buoyant and rich, as we recalled the thinness of our Oxford interests.  The little rooms, like college rooms just shrinking into cells; the long talk on the summer lawn; the old church with its quiet country look of patient peace; the glow of the evening chapel; the run down the hill under the stars, with the sound of Compline Psalms still ringing in our hearts—­ah! happy, happy day!  It was enough.  The resolve that lay half slumbering in our souls took shape; it leapt out.  We would come to Cuddesdon when the time of preparation should draw on!” Readers of this glowing passage have naturally imagined that the writer of it must himself have been a Cuddesdon man, but this is a delusion; and, so far as I know, Holland’s special preparation for Ordination consisted of a visit to Peterborough, where he essayed the desperate task of studying theology under Dr. Westcott.

In September, 1872, he was ordained deacon by Bishop Mackarness, in Cuddesdon Church, being chosen to read the Gospel at the Ordination; and he was ordained priest there just two years later.  It was during his diaconate that I, then a freshman, made his acquaintance.  We often came across one another, in friends’ rooms and at religious meetings, and I used to listen with delight to the sermons which he preached in the parish churches of Oxford.  They were absolutely original; they always exhilarated and uplifted one; and the style was entirely his own, full of lightness and brightness, movement and colour.  Scattered phrases from a sermon at SS.  Philip and James, on the 3rd of May, 1874, and from another at St. Barnabas, on the 28th of June in the same year, still haunt my memory.[*]

[Footnote *:  An Oxford Professor, who had some difficulty with his aspirates, censured a theological essay as “Too ’ollandy by ’alf.”]

Holland lived at this time a wonderfully busy and varied life.  He lectured on Philosophy in Christ Church; he took his full share in the business of University and College; he worked and pleaded for all righteous causes both among the undergraduates and among the citizens.  An Oxford tutor said not long ago:  “A new and strong effort for moral purity in Oxford can be dated from Holland’s Proctorship.”

This seems to be a suitable moment for mentioning his attitude towards social and political questions.  He was “suckled in a creed outworn” of Eldonian Toryism, but soon exchanged it for Gladstonian Liberalism, and this, again, he suffused with an energetic spirit of State Socialism on which Mr. Gladstone would have poured his sternest wrath.  A friend writes:  “I don’t remember that H. S. H., when he was an undergraduate, took much interest in politics more than chaffing others for being so Tory.” (He never spoke at the Union, and had probably not