Untitled - Electric Scotland

42 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. n.
of his early years, and from the recollections of his friends.
On his first visit to London, for example, of which mention
"
one
has been already made, "he came as a letter in," tells,
* Where have you been to, Archie ?
evening from a walk.
he was asked, *
Walking through Lambeth, he replied.
*
Through Lambeth !
was
the astonished answer ;
what ever possessed you to walk in Lambeth ?
*
*
why,
Well, I
wanted to see how I shall like the place when I get there.
A few years later his friend Mr. Hall writes :
"Ogilvie
is flourishing about town, and Jones and I have
agreed to pay him a visit together at your future episcopal resi
dence next week."
(Mr. Ogilvie was chaplain to Archbishop Howley at
Lambeth.) And again, with reference to the disastrous
fire which occurred in the Houses of Parliament, one of
Tait s friends wrote to him as follows, on October 2ist,
1834:
"I was seriously alarmed that I should have had to com
municate to you the intelligence that your palace at Lambeth
was burnt to the ground. It gives me great pleasure, however,
to be able to state that the only serious loss which you have
incurred consists in the total destruction by fire of the Bishops
Bench in the House of Lords."
During his early undergraduate days, the man to
whom, according to his own account, he owed most, was
Frederick Oakeley, Fellow and Tutor of Balliol, after
wards the well-known Canon of the Roman Catholic
Church in Islington. Though Oakeley was ten years
older than Tait, and had been a tutor long before Tait
entered the College as an undergraduate, the two soon
became attached personal friends, and on one occasion
they spent some weeks together in Scotland during a long
vacation.
" He
never seemed tired," wrote the Arch
bishop long afterwards, "of doing me acts of kindness.