Radicalism; and then
just when they began to talk of electing him President and were looking
forward to this Presidency of the Russell as an omen of his future
Presidency of the Union itself, he resigned from the Russell, and
figuratively marched across the road to the Canning, taking with him
half a dozen earnest young converts and galvanizing with new hopes and
new ambitions the Oxford Tories now wilting under the strain of the Boer
war. Mowbray managed to impart to any enterprise the air of a
conspiracy, and Michael never saw him arrive at a meeting of The Oxford
Looking-Glass without feeling they should all assume cloaks and masks
and mutter with heads close together. Mowbray did indeed exist in an
atmosphere of cabals, and his consent to sit upon the committee of The
Oxford Looking-Glass was only a small item in his plot to overthrow
Young Liberalism in Oxford. His rooms at University were always thronged
with satellites, who at a word from him changed to meteors and whizzed
about Oxford feverishly to outshine the equally portentous but less
dazzling exhalations of Liberal opinion.

Stewart of Trinity represented an undergraduate type that perhaps had
endured and would endure longer than any of the others. He would have
been most in his element if he had come up in the early nineties, but
yet with all his intellectual survivals he did not seem an anachronism.
Perhaps it was as well that he had not come up in the nineties, since
much of his obvious and youthful charm might have been buried beneath
absurdities which in those reckless decadent days were carried sometimes
to moral extremes that destroyed a little of the absurdity. As it was,
Stewart was perhaps the most beloved member of Trinity, whether he were
feeding Rugger blues on plovers' eggs or keeping an early chapel with
the expression of an earthbound seraph or playing tennis in the Varsity
doubles or whether, surrounded by Baudelaire and Rollinat and Rops and
Huysmans, he were composing an ode to Satan, with two candles burning
before his shrine of King Charles the Martyr and a ramshorn of snuff and
glasses of mead waiting for casual callers.

With Townsend, Mowbray, and Stewart, thought Michael, added to
Wedderburn's Pre-Raphaelitism and staid Victorian romance, to
Hazlewood's genuine inspiration, and with Maurice Avery to whip the
result into a soufflee of exquisite superficiality, it certainly seemed
as if The Oxford Looking-Glass might run for at least