My first acquaintance with Gladstone, whom I have known from those college days now for more than five and fifty years, was a memorable event, and may thus be worthy of mention.  It was at that time not a common thing for undergraduates to go to the communion at Christchurch Cathedral—­that holy celebration being supposed to be for the particular benefit of Dean and Canons, and Masters of Arts.  So when two undergraduates went out of the chancel together after communion, which they had both attended, it is small wonder that they addressed each other genially, in defiance of Oxford etiquette, nor that a friendship so well begun has continued to this hour.  Not that I have always approved of my friend’s politics; multitudes of letters through many years have passed between us, wherein if I have sometimes ventured to praise or to blame, I have always been answered both gratefully and modestly:  but I have ever tried to hold the balance equally too, according to my lights, and if at one time (on occasion of the great Oxford election, 1864) I published a somewhat famous copy of verses, ending with

    “Orator, statesman, scholar, wit, and sage,
    The Crichton,—­more, the Gladstone of the age,”

my faithfulness must in after years confess to a well-known palinode (one of my “Three Hundred Sonnets”) commencing

    “Beware of mere delusive eloquence,”

and a still more caustic lyric, beginning with

    “Glozing tongue whom none can trust,”

and so forth, as a caution against a great man’s special gift, so proverbially dangerous.  Some of our most honest Ministers, e.g., Althorpe and Wellington, have been very bad speakers:  some of our most eloquent orators have proved very bad Ministers.

And in this place I may introduce some account, long ago in print, of the famous Aristotle class under the tutorship of Mr. Biscoe at Christ Church, wherein (among far nobler and better scholars) your present confessor took the lowest seat.

Fifty years ago Biscoe’s Aristotle class at Christ Church was comprised almost wholly of men who have since become celebrated, some in a remarkable degree; and, as we believe that so many names, afterwards attaining to great distinction, have rarely been associated at one lecture-board, either at Oxford or elsewhere, it may be allowed to one who counts himself the least and lowest of the company to pen this brief note of those old Aristotelians.

Let the central figure be Gladstone—­ever from youth up the beloved and admired of many personal intimates (although some may be politically his opponents).  Always the foremost man, warm-hearted, earnest, hard-working, and religious, he had a following even in his teens; and it is noticeable that a choice lot of young and keen intelligences of Eton and Christ Church formed themselves into a small social sort of club, styled, in compliment to their founder’s initials, the “W.E.G.”