‘I should like to detail to you our [College] proceedings, but no striking features occur to my mind at present; so I will favour you with my general impressions. [Whately?][43] is the only one with whom I have got to be at all intimate; he is not the least of a Don, and I like him very much indeed. [Davison?] is a person for whom I have a very great veneration: but he is such an immense person that I hardly dare bring myself in contact with him.[44] [Newman] is, to my mind, by far the greatest genius of the party, and I cannot help thinking that, sometime or other, I may get to be well acquainted with him: but he is very shy,[45] and dining with a person now and then does not break the ice so quickly as might be wished. I venerate [Davison?] but dislike him: I like [Newman] but disvenerate him. Old [Wilberforce?][46] is very funny, good-natured, and, I think, very much improved. And now for my ill-fated inconsistent self; I have been trying to be diligent, and have been horribly idle; trying to be contented, and yet constantly fidgety; trying to be matter-of-fact, and have nearly cracked myself with conceited metaphysics. This last is principally attributable to Lucretius, whom I have been reading with considerable attention, and intense admiration; I shall very soon have finished him, as I have got on some way in the Sixth Book. In the end of the Book, about the mortality of the soul, there are some magnificent extraordinary reflections on our longings for something indescribable, and beyond our reach; on our having affections which have no adequate object, and which we long to forget and smother, because we cannot gratify them: [reflections] which make a striking preface to Bishop Butler’s sermons on the Love of God.’ June 15, 1826, was the five hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Oriel College. Perhaps the observance of it served to stimulate Hurrell’s filial piety and his spontaneous regard for the past. Few Fellows of Colleges, then or since, ‘supinely enjoying the gifts of the Founder,’ as Gibbon says, would have offered, after such an occasion, this private prayer, found among Hurrell’s papers: