ritish Critic_, July 1841.

[119] _Reminiscences,_ ii. 223.

[120] _Ideal_, p. 566.

[121] _Ibid._ pp. 565-567.

[122] It is part of the history of the time, that during those anxious
days, Mr. Ward was engaged to be married. The engagement came to the
knowledge of his friends, to their great astonishment and amusement,
very soon after the events in the Theatre.

[123] From a _Short Appeal to Members of Convocation on the proposed
Censure on No. 90_. By Frederic Rogers, Fellow of Oriel. (Dated
Saturday, 8th of February 1845.)

CHAPTER XIX

THE CATASTROPHE

The events of February were a great shock. The routine of Oxford had
been broken as it had never been broken by the fiercest strifes before.
Condemnations had been before passed on opinions, and even on persons.
But to see an eminent man, of blameless life, a fellow of one of the
first among the Colleges, solemnly deprived of his degree and all that
the degree carried with it, and that on a charge in which bad faith and
treachery were combined with alleged heresy, was a novel experience,
where the kindnesses of daily companionship and social intercourse still
asserted themselves as paramount to official ideas of position. And
when, besides this, people realised what more had been attempted, and by
how narrow a chance a still heavier blow had been averted from one
towards whom so many hearts warmed, how narrowly a yoke had been escaped
which would have seemed to subject all religious thought in the
University to the caprice or the blind zeal of a partisan official, the
sense of relief was mixed with the still present memory of a desperate
peril And then came the question as to what was to come next. That the
old policy of the Board would be revived and pursued when the end of the
Proctors' year delivered it from their inconvenient presence, was soon
understood to be out of the question. The very violence of the measures
attempted had its reaction, which stopped anything further. The
opponents of Tractarianism, Orthodox and Liberal, were for the moment
gorged with their success. What men waited to see was the effect on the
party of the movement; how it would influence the advanced portion of
it; how it would influence the little company who had looked on in
silence from their retirement at Littlemore. The more serious aspect of
recent events was succeeded for the moment by a certain comic contrast,
created by Mr. Ward's engagement to be married, which