rist Church man, and there began residence,
October 10, 1828. Mr. Gladstone's rooms, during most of his
undergraduate life, were on the right hand, and on the first floor of
the staircase on the right, as one enters by the Canterbury gate. He
tells his mother that they are in a very fashionable part of the
college, and mentions as a delightful fact, that Gaskell and Seymer
have rooms on the same floor. Samuel Smith was head until 1831, when he
was succeeded by the more celebrated Dr. Gaisford, always described by
Mr. Gladstone as a splendid scholar, but a bad dean. Gaisford's
excellent services to the Greek learning of his day are unquestioned,
and he had the signal merit of speech, Spartan brevity. For a short time
in 1806 he had been tutor to Peel. When Lord Liverpool offered him the
Greek professorship, with profuse compliments on his erudition, the
learned man replied, 'My Lord, I have received your letter, and accede
to the contents.--Yours, T. G.' And to the complaining parent of an
undergraduate he wrote, 'Dear Sir,--Such letters as yours are a great
annoyance to your obedient servant T. Gaisford.'[34] This laconic gift
the dean evidently had not time to transmit to all of his flock.

Christ Church in those days was infested with some rowdyism, and in one
bear-fight an undergraduate was actually killed. In the chapel the new
undergraduate found little satisfaction, for the service was scarcely
performed with common decency. There seems, however, to have been no
irreconcilable prejudice against reading, and in the schools the college
was at the top of its academic fame. The influence of Cyril Jackson, the
dean in Peel's time, whose advice to Peel and, other pupils to work like
a tiger, and not to be afraid of killing one's self by work, was still
operative.[35] At the summer examination of 1830, Christ Church won five
first classes out of ten. Most commoners, according to a letter of
Gaskell's, had from three hundred and fifty to five hundred pounds a
year; but gentlemen commoners like Acland and Gaskell had from five to
six hundred. At the end of 1829, Mr. Gladstone received a studentship
_honoris causa_, by nomination of the dean--a system that would not be
approved in our epoch of competitive examination, but still an advance
upon the time-honoured practice of deans and canons disposing of
studentships on grounds of private partiality without reference to
desert. We may assume that the dean was not indifferent t