My first duty, on returning to Oxford, was to marry my cousin John Simeon,[3] until recently an undergraduate of the House, to Miss Adelaide Holmes à Court. My little sermon at the Jesuit church (which was almost filled with the wedding guests) was not intended to be otherwise than cheerful, and I was surprised in the course of it to observe the unusual phenomenon of the bridegroom's father dissolved in tears! The happy couple motored off later to North Wales in a downpour of rain, which (I heard) never once stopped during their brief honeymoon. Father Maturin (whose repute as an orator had been long established in Oxford) was giving our weekly conferences this term, and I was greatly struck with them--packed close with thought and luminous argument, and scintillating besides with {141} genuine eloquence. I had heard many of his pulpit orations, but I thought this series of lectures the finest thing he had ever done, though perhaps slightly over the heads of his undergraduate auditors. I was myself fully occupied at this time with a long article (biographical and critical) on St. Gregory Nazianzene,[4] which, by a happy coincidence, I completed on May 9, the feast-day of that great saint and doctor. I took two days off for a visit to Cambridge (my first for fourteen years) in connection with the Fisher Society dinner, at which I represented Oxford and the "Newman." Some distinguished guests--a Cardinal, a judge, an author, and a statesman--failed us at the last moment; but the gathering was cheery and successful and the after-dinner oratory much less wearisome than usual. I visited, of course, while at Cambridge, the really noble Catholic church of Our Lady--finer, I thought (as I had thought before), and more impressive outside than in. I remembered that the great church of St. John at Norwich had given me precisely the contrary impression.