Untitled - Electric Scotland

44 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. 11.
priesthood. 1 To extreme old age he retained his warm
affection for his former pupil, and he lost no opportunity,
in speech or letter, of giving expression to his regard.
When he felt himself dying 2 he said to those about him :
"
Let my dear friend the Archbishop of Canterbury know
as soon as I am gone."
Of Tait s undergraduate days there is not very much
to tell. He worked hard and successfully, but he does
not seem to have been widely known beyond the walls
of his own College, except for the prominent part he took
from the first in the debates of the Union Society.
In place of the boyish Toryism of his Glasgow days,
he was now, if we may judge from the Union records,
developing into an earnest and consistent Whig, and the
votes he gave in the Oxford Union were such as he would
have given to the end of his life. Before he had been six
months at Oxford, he stood forth, in opposition to
Roundell Palmer, to defend the Spirit of Democracy,
and the happy results of Catholic Emancipation. In the
debates which followed the passing of the great Reform
Bill, his name appears regularly upon the popular side.
Twice within a year he "that urges no ministry can hope
which is not
to carry on the government of this country
framed as well upon a principle of extensive practical
Reform as of preserving the established rights of property."
In 1833 h succeeded Edward Card well as President of
the Society. The last debate in which he took part was
on March 28th, 1835, when he affirmed "that a legislative
provision for the Roman Catholic priesthood
in Ireland
would be a most beneficial measure." On a division the
motion was defeated by more than two to one, and upon
1 He went to London in the summer of 1839, and joined the Roman
Catholic Communion a few years later, being admitted to Priest s Orders in
the Roman Church in 1847.
- On January 29, 1880. See vol. ii. p. 525.