tter from Peel, resigning the seat for the university, was read
before the assembly. It was addressed to the vice-chancellor and
had arrived just before, it was understood; and I suppose brought
hither the first positive and indubitable announcement of the
government's intention to emancipate the catholics.

A few days later, Peel accepted the Chiltern Hundreds, and after some
deliberation allowed himself to be again brought forward for
re-election. He was beaten by 755 votes to 609. The relics of the
contest, the figures and the inscriptions on the walls, soon
disappeared, but panic did not abate. On Gladstone's way to Oxford
(April 30, 1829), a farmer's wife got into the coach, and in
communicative vein informed him how frightened they had all been about
catholic emancipation, but she did not see that so much had come of it
as yet. The college scout declared himself much troubled for the king's
conscience, observing that if we make an oath at baptism, we ought to
hold by it. 'The bed-makers,' Gladstone writes home, 'seem to continue
in a great fright, and mine was asking me this morning whether it would
not be a very good thing if we were to give them [the Irish] a king and
a parliament of their own, and so to have no more to do with them. The
old egg-woman is no whit easier, and wonders how Mr. Peel, who was
always such a well-behaved man here, can be so foolish as to think of
letting in the Roman catholics.' The unthinking and the ignorant of all
classes were much alike. Arthur Hallam went to see _King John_ in 1827,
and he tells his friend how the lines about the Italian priest (Act III.
Sc. 1) provoked rounds of clapping, while a gentleman in the next box
cried out at the top of his voice, 'Bravo! Bravo! No Pope!' The same
correspondent told Gladstone of the father of a common Eton friend, who
had challenged him with the overwhelming question, 'Could I say that any
papist had ever at any time done any good to the world?' A still
stormier conflict than even the emancipation of the catholics was now to
shake Oxford and the country to the depths, before Mr. Gladstone took
his degree.

II

OXFORD FRIENDSHIPS

His friendships at Oxford Mr. Gladstone did not consider to have been as
a rule very intimate. Principal among them were Frederick Rogers, long
afterwards Lord Blachford; Doyle; Gaskell; Bruce, afterwards Lord Elgin;
Charles C