ay that his sermon was
admirable, and quite as remarkable for the judicious and sober manner in
which he enforced his views, as for their lofty principles and piety. He
preached, I think, for an hour and forty minutes.' The admiration thus
first aroused only grew with fuller knowledge in the coming years.

ESSAY CLUB

An Essay Club, called from its founder's initials the WEG, was formed at
a meeting in Gaskell's rooms in October, 1829. Only two members out of
the first twelve did not belong to Christ Church, Rogers of Oriel and
Moncreiff of New.[45] The Essay Club's transactions, though not very
serious, deserve a glance. Mr. Gladstone reads an essay (Feb. 20, 1830)
on the comparative rank of poetry and philosophy, concluding with a
motion that the rank of philosophy is higher than that of poetry: it was
beaten by seven to five. Without a division, they determined that
English poetry is of a higher order than Greek. The truth of the
principles of phrenology was affirmed with the tremendous emphasis of
eleven to one. Though trifling in degree, the influence of the modern
drama was pronounced in quality pernicious. Gladstone gave his casting
vote against the capacious proposition, of which philosophers had made
so much in France, Switzerland, and other places on the eve of the
French revolution, that education and other outward circumstances have
more than nature to do with man's disposition. By four to three, Mr.
Tennyson's poems were affirmed to show considerable genius, Gladstone
happily in the too slender majority. The motion that 'political liberty
is not to be considered as the end of government' was a great affair.
Maurice, who had been admitted to the club on coming to Oxford from
Cambridge, moved an amendment 'that every man has a right to perform
certain personal duties with which no system of government has a right
to interfere.' Gladstone 'objected to an observation that had fallen
from the mover, "A man finds himself in the world," as if he did not
come into the world under a debt to his parents, under obligations to
society.' The tame motion of Lord Abercorn, that Elizabeth's conduct to
Mary Queen of Scots was unjustifiable and impolitic, was stiffened into
'not only unjustifiable and impolitic, but a base and treacherous
murder,' and in that severe form was carried without a division.

Plenty of nonsense was talked we may be sure, and so there was, no
doubt, in the Olive Grove