It is very remarkable that this thought should have occurred at such a moment to one who only became a missionary thirty-five years later, at a summons from without, not from within. The distinct mission impulse passed away, but a strong desire remained to devote himself to the ministry of the Church. He tried to stifle it at first, lest it should be a form of conceit or pride; but it only grew upon him, and at last he spoke to Mr. Eyre, who promised to broach the subject to his parents. His father was strongly averse to it, as an overthrow to all his plans, and Mr. Eyre, after hearing both sides, said that he should give no opinion for a year; it would not hurt Daniel to remain another year in the warehouse, to fulfil the term of his apprenticeship, and it would then be proper time to decide whether to press his father to change his mind. It was a very sore trial to the young man, who had many reasons for deeming this sheer waste of time, though he owned he had not lost much of his school learning, having always loved it so much as to read as much Latin as he could in his leisure hours. He submitted at first, but was uneasy under his submission, and asked counsel from all the clergymen he revered, who seem all to have advised _him_ to be patient, but to have urged his father to yield, which he finally did before the year was out; so that Daniel Wilson was entered at St. Edmund's Hall, Oxford, on the 1st of May, 1798. He struggled with the eagerness of one whose desire had grown by meeting with obstacles. In order to acquire a good Latin style, he translated all Cicero's letters into English, and then back into Latin; and when he went up for his degree, he took, besides his Latin and Greek books, the whole Hebrew Bible, but was only examined in the Psalms. He gained a triumphant first-class, and the next year, 1803, he carried off the English prose essay prize. The theme was "Common Sense." He had not in the least expected to gain the prize, and had not even mentioned the competition to his friends, so that their delight and surprise were equal. That same year, Reginald Heber was happy in the subject for Sir Roger Newdegate's prize for English verse, namely, "Palestine," which in this case had fallen to a poet too real to be crushed by the greatness of his subject. Reginald Heber was used to society of high talent and cultivation. His elder brother, Richard, was an elegant scholar and antiquary, and was intimate with Mr. Marriott, of Rokeby; with Mr. Surtees, the beauty of whose forged ballads almost makes us forgive him for having palmed them off as genuine; and with Walter Scott, then chiefly known as "the compiler of the 'Border Minstrelsy,'" but who a few years later immortalized his friendship for Richard Heber by the sixth of his introductions to "Marmion,"--the best known, as it contains the description of the Christmas of the olden time. It concludes with the wish--