What was he like at this period of his life? A graphic letter just received enables me to answer this question. "When I first met him, I looked on him with the deepest interest, and realized the charm that everyone felt. He had just gone up to Oxford, and was intensely keen on Ruskin and Browning, and devoted to music. He would listen with rapt attention when we played Chopin and Schumann to him. I used to meet him at dinner-parties when I first came out, by which time he was very enthusiastic on the Catholic side, and very fond of St. Barnabas, Pimlico, and was also deeply moved by social questions, East End poor, etc.; always unconventional, and always passionately interested in whatever he talked of. Burne-Jones once told me: 'It was perfectly delicious to see Holland come into a room, laughing before he had even said a word, and always bubbling over with life and joy.' Canon Mason said to me many years ago that he had hoped I kept every scrap Scotty ever wrote to me, as he was quite sure he was the most remarkable man of his generation. But there was a grave background to all this merriment. I remember that, as we were coming out of a London party, and looked on the hungry faces in the crowd outside the door, I rather foolishly said: 'One couldn't bear to look at them unless one felt that there was another world for them.' He replied: 'Are we to have both, then?' I know how his tone and the look in his face haunted me more than I can say." A contemporary at Oxford writes, with reference to the same period: "When we went up, Liddon was preaching his Bamptons, and we went to them together, and were much moved by them. There were three of us who always met for Friday teas in one another's rooms, and during Lent we used to go to the Special Sermons at St. Mary's. We always went to Liddon's sermons, and sometimes to his Sunday evening lectures in the Hall of Queen's College. We used to go to the Choral Eucharist in Merton Chapel, and, later, to the iron church at Cowley, and to St. Barnabas, and enjoyed shouting the Gregorians." On the intellectual side, we are told that Holland's love of literature was already marked. "I can remember reading Wordsworth with him, and Carlyle, and Clough; and, after Sunday breakfasts, Boswell's _Life of Johnson_." Then, as always, he found a great part of his pleasure in music.