anning, afterwards Lord Canning; the two Denisons; Lord
Lincoln. These had all been his friends at Eton. Among new acquisitions
to the circle of his intimates at one time or another of his Oxford
life, were the two Aclands, Thomas and Arthur; Hamilton, afterwards
Bishop of Salisbury; Phillimore, destined to close and life-long
friendship; F. D. Maurice, then of Exeter College, a name destined to
stir so many minds in the coming generation. Of Maurice, Arthur Hallam
had written to Gladstone (June 1830) exhorting him to cultivate his
acquaintance. 'I know many,' says Hallam, 'whom Maurice has moulded like
a second nature, and these too, men eminent for intellectual power, to
whom the presence of a commanding spirit would in all other cases be a
signal rather for rivalry than reverential acknowledgment.' 'I knew
Maurice well,' says Mr. Gladstone in one of his notes of reminiscence,
'had heard superlative accounts of him from Cambridge, and really strove
hard to make them all realities to myself. One Sunday morning we walked
to Marsh Baldon to hear Mr. Porter, the incumbent, a calvinist
independent of the _clique_, and a man of remarkable power as we both
thought. I think he and other friends did me good, but I got little
solid meat from him, as I found him difficult to catch and still more
difficult to hold.'

Sidney Herbert, afterwards so dear to him, now at Oriel, here first
became an acquaintance. Manning, though they both read with the same
tutor, and one succeeded the other as president of the Union, he did not
at this time know well. The lists of his guests at wines and breakfasts
do not even contain the name of James Hope; indeed, Mr. Gladstone tells
us that he certainly was not more than an acquaintance. In the account
of intimates is the unexpected name of Tupper, who, in days to come,
acquired for a time a grander reputation than he deserved by his
_Proverbial Philosophy_, and on whom the public by and by avenged its
own foolishness by severer doses of mockery than he had earned.[39] The
friend who seems most to have affected him in the deepest things was
Anstice, whom he describes to his father (June 4, 1830) as 'a very
clever man, and more than a clever man, a man of excellent principle and
of perfect self-command, and of great industry. If any circumstances
could confer upon me the inestimable blessing of fixed habits and
unremitting industry, these [the example of such a man] will be they.'
The diary tells ho