The senior Censor of Christ Church was Osborne Gordon, a brilliant character whom to have known was indeed a privilege, and as I had the good fortune to be his pupil and he was very kind to me, he has remained one of the pleasantest memories of my university days. He was a finished scholar, very witty, with a great appreciation of character. He would say the drollest things with the most imperturbable gravity, being in his way a man of the world, in spite of the cramping tendencies of the Oxford common room. When Lord Lisburne took his son, my contemporary, to Christ Church, he consulted Mr. Gordon as to what allowance he should give him as a Tuft. “Well, Lord Lisburne,” answered the witty Don, cocking his trencher cap on one side as was his wont when he was going to say something very funny, “you can give your son any allowance you like, but please remember that his debts will always be in proportion to his allowance”—a most sagacious remark! On another occasion, a certain young gentleman went to him and asked him whether he had any chance of passing his little-go. “Well! you have one great advantage,” was the answer. “You will go into the examination absolutely unhampered by facts.” During the time that I was at Oxford, Charles Spurgeon was making a new sensation as a preacher. One Sunday Osborne Gordon and two or three Oxford Dons went up to London to hear him. The next evening my tutor came, as he often did, to smoke a pipe in my rooms. I asked him what had been the impression made by Spurgeon on him and his friends. They had been struck by Spurgeon’s power, but had been greatly shocked when the preacher, after laying down a rule of life, went on to say: “If you do as I have told you to do, and if after that Jesus Christ should at your death refuse you admittance to heaven, you tell Him that Charles Spurgeon says He is a very shabby fellow!” Surely, contempt of all convention and the familiar degradation of the most sacred Name could hardly go further. Throw propriety to the winds, and it is an easy matter to make a startling speech or preach an arresting sermon. To Gordon’s cultivated and fastidious mind such levity and vulgarizing of the sublime could only be repellent. Osborne Gordon was afterwards, in 1860, appointed Vicar of East Hampstead, where he was as much beloved by Lord and Lady Downshire and his other parishioners as he had been at Oxford. Who that really knew him could help loving him? He died in 1883. Ruskin wrote his epitaph—rather a stilted Johnsonian attempt.