March, 1837.

The prize was won that year by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, afterwards Dean
of Westminster. Our candidate and his old schoolfellow, Henry Dart, of
Exeter College, set to work on the next subject, "The Exile of St.
Helena," and after the long vacation read their work to each other,
accepting the hints and corrections of a friendly rivalry.

Meantime his old nurse Anne (it is trivial, but a touch of nature),
being at Oxford in attendance on the ladies, and keen, as she always
was, for Master John's success, heard from the keeper of the
Reading-room of criticisms on his published verses. She brought the news
to his delighted mother. "He was pleased," she writes, "but says that he
forms his own estimate of his poems, and reviews don't alter it; but
'How my father will be delighted! How he will crow!'" Which historiette
repeated itself many a time in the family annals.

In Lent term, 1838, he was hard at work on the new poem. He wrote:

"I must give an immense time every day to the Newdigate, which I
must have, if study will get it. I have much to revise. You find
many faults, but there are hundreds which have escaped your notice,
and many lines must go out altogether which you and I should wish
to stay in. The thing must be remodelled, and I must finish it
while it has a freshness on it, otherwise it will not be written
well. The old lines are hackneyed in my ears, even as a very soft
Orleans plum, which your Jewess has wiped and re-wiped with the
corner of her apron, till its polish is perfect, and its
temperature elevated."

In this March he got through his "Smalls."

"Nice thing to get over; quite a joke, as everybody says when
they've got through with the feathers on. It's a kind of
emancipation from freshness--a thing unpleasant in an egg, but
dignified in an Oxonian--very. Lowe very kind; Kynaston ditto--nice
fellows--urbane. How they _do_ frighten people! There was one man
all but crying with mere fear. Kynaston had to coax him like a
child. Poor fellow! he had some reason to be afraid; did his logic
shockingly. People always take up logic because they fancy it
doesn't require a good memory, and there is nothing half so
productive of pluck; they _never_ know it. I was very cool when I
got into it; found the degree of excitement agreeable; nibbled the
end of my pen and grinned at Kynaston ov