A little later there was a great audience in the Town Hall, to hear Joe Chamberlain inveigh against the new Government,[3] and preach _his_ fiscal gospel. He was in excellent form, and looked nothing like seventy, though his long speech--his last, I think, before his great break-down--certainly aged him visibly. A little incident at the opening showed his undiminished aptitude for ready repartee. He announced his intention of treating Tariff Reform from the Imperial standpoint, adding, "I am not going to deal with the subject from the economic side"; and then, as a derisive "Yah!" broke from some disgruntled Liberals at the back of the hall, going on without a moment's hesitation--"not, however, for the reason which I see suggests itself to some of the _acuter_ minds among my audience!" {60} S---- H----, whom I found waiting to see me when I got home from the Town Hall, told me that after two years in the Catholic Church he was thinking of returning to the flesh-pots of Anglicanism, and said (among other foolish things) that he had "a Renaissance mind!" I ventured to remind him that he had also an immortal soul. How to increase his income seemed his chief preoccupation; and he did not "see his way" (that fatal phrase again!) to do this as a "practising" Catholic. Wilfrid Ward, the Editor of the _Dublin Review_, had recently started a "dining-and-debating-club" in London with a rather interesting membership; and I went up in November to read a paper on "Catholics at the National Universities." I was less "heckled" than I expected; but there was some "good talk" (as old Johnson would have said), and I enjoyed the evening. Less enjoyable was another evening spent with our Architectural Society at Oxford, to hear a lecture by Wells (fellow and future Warden) of Wadham, on "Tudor Oxford" an interesting topic, and treated by a man who knew his subject, but disfigured by strongly Protestant interpolations about monks, Jesuits, and "Bloody Mary," much out of place in an address to a quite "undenominational" society. It recalled another paper read to us on the inoffensive subject of "Bells." The reader on that occasion adroitly founded on the text of the inscriptions on church bells a violent diatribe against the invocation of saints and other "mediæval corruptions," to the intense annoyance of my little friend the Master of Pembroke (himself an Anglican bishop), who sat next me, and whom I with difficulty restrained until {61} the end of the lecture from rising to protest, as he ultimately did with some warmth, against "turning an archæological address into a polemical sermon."