Perhaps an even stronger influence was that of Edward King, afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, and then Principal of Cuddesdon, in whom the most persuasive aspects of the priestly character were beautifully displayed, and who made Cuddesdon a sort of shrine to which all that was spiritual and ardent in young Oxford was irresistibly attracted. Preaching, years afterwards, at a Cuddesdon Festival, Holland uttered this moving panegyric of the place to which he owed so much: "Ah! which of us does not know by what sweet entanglement Cuddesdon threw its net about our willing feet? Some summer Sunday, perhaps, we wandered here, in undergraduate days, to see a friend; and from that hour the charm was at work. How joyous, how enticing, the welcome, the glad brotherhood! So warm and loving it all seemed, as we thought of the sharp skirmishing of our talk in College; so buoyant and rich, as we recalled the thinness of our Oxford interests. The little rooms, like college rooms just shrinking into cells; the long talk on the summer lawn; the old church with its quiet country look of patient peace; the glow of the evening chapel; the run down the hill under the stars, with the sound of Compline Psalms still ringing in our hearts--ah! happy, happy day! It was enough. The resolve that lay half slumbering in our souls took shape; it leapt out. We would come to Cuddesdon when the time of preparation should draw on!" Readers of this glowing passage have naturally imagined that the writer of it must himself have been a Cuddesdon man, but this is a delusion; and, so far as I know, Holland's special preparation for Ordination consisted of a visit to Peterborough, where he essayed the desperate task of studying theology under Dr. Westcott. In September, 1872, he was ordained deacon by Bishop Mackarness, in Cuddesdon Church, being chosen to read the Gospel at the Ordination; and he was ordained priest there just two years later. It was during his diaconate that I, then a freshman, made his acquaintance. We often came across one another, in friends' rooms and at religious meetings, and I used to listen with delight to the sermons which he preached in the parish churches of Oxford. They were absolutely original; they always exhilarated and uplifted one; and the style was entirely his own, full of lightness and brightness, movement and colour. Scattered phrases from a sermon at SS. Philip and James, on the 3rd of May, 1874, and from another at St. Barnabas, on the 28th of June in the same year, still haunt my memory.[*] [Footnote *: An Oxford Professor, who had some difficulty with his aspirates, censured a theological essay as "Too 'ollandy by 'alf."]