attitude of the governing authorities hardened more into determined
hostility. From the time of the censure, and especially after the events
connected with it,--the contest for the Poetry Professorship and the
renewed Hampden question,--it may be said that the characteristic
tempers of the Corcyrean sedition were reproduced on a small scale in
Oxford.[97] The scare of Popery, not without foundation--the reaction
against it, also not without foundation--had thrown the wisest off their
balance; and what of those who were not wise? In the heat of those days
there were few Tractarians who did not think Dr. Wynter, Dr. Faussett,
and Dr. Symons heretics in theology and persecutors in temper, despisers
of Christian devotion and self-denial. There were few of the party of
the Heads who did not think every Tractarian a dishonest and perjured
traitor, equivocating about his most solemn engagements, the ignorant
slave of childish superstitions which he was conspiring to bring back.
It was the day of the violent on both sides: the courtesies of life were
forgotten; men were afraid of being weak in their censures, their
dislike, and their opposition; old friendships were broken up, and men
believed the worst of those whom a few years back they had loved and
honoured.

It is not agreeable to recall these long extinct animosities, but they
are part of the history of that time, and affected the course in which
things ran. And it is easy to blame, it is hard to do justice to, the
various persons and parties who contributed to the events of that
strange and confused time. All was new, and unusual, and without
precedent in Oxford; a powerful and enthusiastic school reviving old
doctrines in a way to make them seem novelties, and creating a wild
panic from a quarter where it was the least expected; the terror of this
panic acting on authorities not in the least prepared for such a trial
of their sagacity, patience, and skill, driving them to unexampled
severity, and to a desperate effort to expel the disturbing
innovators--among them some of the first men in Oxford in character and
ability--from their places in the University.[98] In order to do justice
on each side at this distance of time, we are bound to make
allowance--both for the alarm and the mistaken violence of the
authorities, and for the disaffection, the irritation, the strange
methods which grew up in the worried and suspected party--for the
difficulties which beset both side