to impatience, was not capable of coping with the
rough work involved in the task of reform, which he had undertaken.

All this time the four o'clock sermons at St. Mary's were always going
on. But, besides these, he anticipated a freedom--familiar now, but
unknown then--of public lecturing. In Advent and after Easter a company,
never very large, used to gather on a week-day afternoon in Adam de
Brome's Chapel--the old Chapel of "Our Lady of Littlemore"--to hear him
lecture on some theological subject. It is a dark, dreary appendage to
St. Mary's on the north side, in which Adam de Brome, Edward II.'s
almoner, and the founder of Oriel College, is supposed to lie, beneath
an unshapely tomb, covered by a huge slab of Purbeck marble, from which
the brass has been stripped. The place is called a chapel, but is more
like a court or place of business, for which, indeed, it was used in the
old days by one of the Faculties of the House of Convocation, which held
its assemblies there. At the end is a high seat and desk for the person
presiding, and an enclosure and a table for officials below him; and
round the rest of the dingy walls run benches fixed to the wall, dingy
as the walls themselves. But it also had another use. On occasions of a
university sermon, a few minutes before it began, the Heads of Houses
assembled, as they still assemble, in the chapel, ranging themselves on
the benches round the walls. The Vice-Chancellor has his seat on one
side, the preacher, with the two Proctors below him, sits opposite; and
there all sit in their robes, more or less grand, according to the day,
till the beadle comes to announce that it is time to form the procession
into church. This desolate place Mr. Newman turned into his
lecture-room; in it he delivered the lectures which afterwards became
the volume on the _Prophetical Character of the Church_, or _Romanism
and Popular Protestantism_; the lectures which formed the volume on
_Justification_; those on _Antichrist_, and on _Rationalism and the
Canon of Scripture_, which afterwards became Nos. 83 and 85 of the
_Tracts for the Times_.[64] The force, the boldness, the freedom from
the trammels of commonplace, the breadth of view and grasp of the
subject which marked those lectures, may be seen in them still. But it
is difficult to realise now the interest with which they were heard at
the time by the first listeners to that clear and perfectly modulated
voice, opening to them fresh an