Among his friends at Oxford were Cardinal Manning, Lord Lincoln, who as Duke of Newcastle was afterwards closely associated with him at the War Office; Lord Elgin, Lord Dalhousie, and Lord Canning, all three Viceroys of India. It was there, too, that his friendship with Mr. Gladstone began. Lord Stanmore says that Mr. Gladstone told him a year or two before his death how one day at a University Convocation dealing with a petition against the Roman Catholic Relief Bill, to which he had himself gone as an undergraduate outsider, he had noticed among the crowd of undergraduates in the vestibule of the Convocation House “a tall and graceful figure, surmounted by a face of such singular sweetness and refinement that his attention was at once riveted by it, and with such force that the picture he then saw rose again as vividly before him while talking as when first seen sixty-eight years before.” Mr. Gladstone inquired the name of this attractive freshman. “Herbert of Oriel,” was the answer. They became friends; but in those days friendships between men of different colleges and different ages were not always easily kept up. The more intimate relations between himself and Herbert date only from a later time. Herbert’s noble and beautiful life was to be closely intertwined with that of his little friend and neighbour, in one of those friendships—holy in their unselfish ardour of comradeship and service of others—which put to shame many of the foolish sayings of the world, and prove that, while an ideal marriage is the divinest happiness God gives to earthly life, an ideal friendship also has the power to lift both joy and pain into the region of heaven itself. This was a friendship which, as we shall see, arose in the first instance partly out of the fact that the two children grew up on neighbouring estates, and were both what Mrs. Tollemache has called “Sunday people”—people with leisure to give to others, as well as wealth; and at the end of Sidney Herbert’s life it was said that the following description of Sir Philip Sidney, after whom he was named, was in every particular a description of him:— “He was gentle, loving, compassionate, forgiving as a woman, and yet had the dignity and valour of a man. His liberality was so great that with him not to give was not to enjoy what he had. “In his familiarity with men he never descended, but raised everybody to his own level. So modest, so humble was he, and so inaccessible to flattery, that he esteemed not praise except as an encouragement to further exertion in well-doing. His tongue knew no deceit, and his mind no policy but frankness, courage, and sincerity, and ... England has had greater statesmen, but never so choice a union of the qualities which make a Sidney. His fame is founded on those personal qualities of which his contemporaries were the best judges, although they may not leave a trace in books or in history.”