Johnstone had entered Oxford at a time of great intellectual ferment. Looking back we can now see that it was during the years about 1880 that the revolutionary flood ran highest. The authority of Darwin and Huxley was unquestioned by many of the younger generation and all-embracing. The vague Christianity and sentimental optimism of Tennyson was held in little esteem beside the wider tolerance, the subtle analysis, the ceaseless curiosity of Browning. Above all "the Bard," as Swinburne was admiringly called, was the poet of the young men. Another very important factor in the mental development of our generation--and for Johnstone, perhaps, the strongest of all--was supplied by the French literature of the century, from the Romantic School onwards. It is no wonder, therefore, that the reaction from the High Church influences and surroundings of his youth was severe and complete, and that his highly æsthetic nature demanded the fullest artistic and intellectual freedom. The so-called "æsthetic movement," as we have before implied, left him untouched. He would have nothing to do with the attempt to symbolise and revive a civilisation that had utterly passed away, nor with the deliberate neglect of the modern world, and its most intense and living art--Music. Johnstone had not much mediæval sense, and was sparing in his appreciation of Rossetti, to whom he became unjust. What he liked best was "Jenny," though he was rightly critical on the unsound streaks in its rhetoric. It was first brought home to him, as to others of his group, by the skilful and dramatic reading, in a singular clanging voice, of his chief Keble friend, C. W. Pettit: a young man of high and melancholy character who was found drowned, probably by accident, in the Upper River, near Oxford, in the spring of 1882. A memorial stone with Pettit's initials marks the place, in an unfrequented reach of the stream, and the inscription, if not effaced, is now a mystery except to some few who remember him.