Untitled - Electric Scotland

1841] REMINISCENCES BY DEAN LAKE 107
Ultramontanes, and whose powerful and thorough-going logic,
not always under the control of facts, often carried most of us,
who were then young Fellows, off our legs ; he laid himself out
indeed for proselytism to an amusing extent, and Stanley and
Clough were successively, rather to the friends, almost absorbed by
annoyance of their
him. Common rooms are said, in
these later days, to have very much changed their character, but
about that time one or two of the principal, such as Merton with
(Cardinal) Manning, Hope-Scott, and Bruce (Lord Elgin), and
Balliol with Tait and Ward, were delightful arenas of intellectual
life. Many and vehement certainly were the disputes between
Tait and Ward in the Balliol Common Room, where they
were admirably matched, each respecting the other s acute-
ness and power of argument, and I never remember the slightest
loss of temper on either side. I must say, on referring to
a journal which I kept at that time, that Ward seems to me
never to have shrunk from any extravagance, or what he called
going the whole hog, when his it.
argument required
" As I have alluded once or twice to Tait s pupils, I may
perhaps complete this picture of his tutorial life by saying that
he had fallen in with a rather remarkable and active-minded set
of scholars, not very easy to manage intellectually. Sir John
Wickens, Stanley, Goulburn, Jowett, Clough, Sir Stafford Northcote,
Lord Coleridge, Temple Bishop of London, and Matthew
Arnold, all followed each other as scholars in the seven years of
his tutorship ; and the list of names will show you that we were
a set of young fellows who were very much disposed to take our
own line no doubt too much so almost from the first days of
our Oxford life. About half were Etonians, and most of the
others had come fresh from Arnold, full of raw ideas, which we
had got from our Pops, and other debating societies, and having
looked forward to Oxford as a new world of life ajid thought.
It certainly became so to many of us, and I, for one, cannot
look back to any years so full of life and enjoyment as my three
undergraduate years at Balliol, when old Ward, as we familiarly
called him, was inducting us into John Stuart Mill, John Austin,
etc., and we were ourselves vainly endeavouring to imbue him
with Coleridge and Wordsworth both he and Tait being at that
time equally intolerant of poetry while the successive works of
Newman, and hrs weekly sermons, exercised a sort of sobering
influence in the background. Meanwhile Tait s lectures kept us