‘It was in company with Mr Sunderland and Arthur Hallam that I formed part of a deputation sent from the Union of Cambridge to the Union of Oxford; and what do you think we went about? Why, we went to assert the right of Mr Shelley to be considered a greater poet than Lord Byron. At that time we in Cambridge were all very full of Mr Shelley. We had printed the _Adonais_ for the first time in England, and a friend of ours suggested that as Shelley had been expelled from Oxford, and greatly ill-treated, it would be a very grand thing for us to go to Oxford and raise a debate upon his character and powers. So, with full permission of the authorities[82] we went.... We had a very interesting debate ... but we were very much shocked, and our vanity was not a little wounded, to find that nobody at Oxford knew anything about Mr Shelley. In fact, a considerable number of our auditors believed that it was Shenstone, and said that they only knew one poem of his, beginning, “My banks are all furnished with bees.” We hoped, however, that our apostolate was of some good...[83].’ Sir Francis Doyle is provokingly brief in his account of the performances of his Cambridge allies. Sunderland, he tells us, ‘spoke with great effect, though scarcely, I believe, with the same fire that he often put forth on more congenial subjects. Then followed Hallam, with equal if not superior force.’ Of Milnes he says but little. After recounting the discomfiture of a speaker from Oriel, who while declaiming against Shelley suddenly caught sight of him, he adds: ‘Lord Houghton then stood up, and showed consummate skill as an advocate.... After him there was silence in the Union for several minutes, and then Mr Manning of Baliol rose.’ He was on the side of Byron; and when the votes were taken the members present agreed with him. Mr Gladstone, in a conversation with the author of the life of Cardinal Manning, has given a rather different account of the matter: ‘There was an invasion of barbarians among civilized men, or of civilized men among barbarians. Cambridge men used to look down upon us at Oxford as prim and behind the times. A deputation from the Society of the Apostles at Cambridge, consisting of Monckton Milnes and Henry [Arthur] Hallam, and Sunderland, came to set up among us the cult of Shelley; or at any rate, to introduce the School of Shelley as against the Byronic School at Oxford—Shelley that is, not in his negative, but in his spiritual side. I knew Hallam at Eton, and, I believe, was the intermediary in bringing about the discussion[84].’ This view, that the commission of the three knights-errant emanated from the Apostles, and not from themselves, or from the Union Society, is borne out to some degree by Blakesley’s account. But for this we have no space. We will conclude with Manning’s admirable description of the scene. It occurs in a letter dated 3 November, 1866—just after Lord Houghton had made his speech at the Cambridge Union.