Untitled - Electric Scotland

1834-41] ELECTED FELLOW OF BALLIOL 55
The summer vacation of 1834 brought
a new ex
perience. It was the first of a series of long vacations, in
each of which he travelled abroad. His companion on
this first occasion was Mr. Oakeley. They went to
Holland, up the Rhine, and home by Paris. His rough
diary bears evidence of the care he invariably took
to pick up accurate information upon the statistics and
politics of lands other than his own. It used often to be
remarked in later days what an unusual interest the Arch
bishop took in the internal politics of Germany and
France, and this may in great
measure be ascribed to the
basis he had early laid of accurate information upon
subjects about which most Englishmen know very little.
The Fellowship election came on in November 1834.
Tait believed himself to have failed in the examination,
and he has often described how he was sitting in his room,
in disappointed and anxious thought, listening to the bell
ringing for evening chapel, when the door flew open, and
his friend Tickell rushed in to drag him off to the chapel
to take his place among the Fellows.
So began a new life, with many new friends. On the
same day with himself was elected to a Balliol Fellowship
a man who was to play no small part in the coming
fortunes or misfortunes of the Church in Oxford. William
George Ward at the time of his election was a strong
Radical, and an admirer of Dr. Arnold, but he was
destined before long to fall, like others, under the spell of
John Henry Newman, and to become, in his own peculiar
fashion, a leader in the fray.
No sooner did Archibald Tait enter on his Fellowship
than he seems to have tried to inaugurate reforms of
which, as an undergraduate, he had felt the need. But he
was able to do very little in this direction until he became,
a year later/ a Tutor of the College. In December 1834,