perfection. When I insist on this, I am all in the faith and tradition
of Oxford."

Of the Honorary Degree conferred on him by Oxford, he said: "Nothing
could more gratify me, I think, than this recognition by my own
University, of which I am so fond, and where, according to their own
established standard of distinction, I did so little." And, after the
Encænia at which the degree was actually given, he wrote: "I felt sure I
should be well received, because there is so much of an Oxford character
about what I have written, and the undergraduates are the last people to
bear one a grudge for having occasionally chaffed them."

And here let me insert the moving passage in which, speaking in his
last years to an American audience, he did honour to the spiritual
master of his undergraduate days. "Forty years ago Cardinal Newman was
in the very prime of life; he was close at hand to us at Oxford; he was
preaching in St. Mary's pulpit every Sunday; he seemed about to
transform and to renew what was for us the most national and natural
institution in the world, the Church of England. Who could resist the
charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light
through the aisles of St. Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then, in
the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and
thoughts which were a religious music--subtle, sweet, mournful? I seem
to hear him still.... Or, if we followed him back to his seclusion at
Littlemore, that dreary village by the London road, and to the house of
retreat and the church which he built there--a mean house such as Paul
might have lived in when he was tent-making at Ephesus, a church plain
and thinly sown with worshippers--who could resist him there either,
welcoming back to the severe joys of Church-fellowship, and of daily
worship and prayer, the firstlings of a generation which had well-nigh