But intellectual eminence there certainly was at this time, for in the class-lists of Mich. 1808 to Mich. 1810, out of thirty-seven first-classes Brasenose claimed seven, monopolizing one list altogether; and out of seventy-five second-classes it held twelve. This was the period of what has been called the “famous Brasenose breakfast.” Reginald Heber won the Newdigate in 1803 with a poem which will never be forgotten--his _Palestine_. His rooms were on Staircase 6, one pair left, under the great chestnut in Exeter Garden called Heber’s Tree. In 1803 Sir Walter Scott went to Oxford with Richard Heber, Reginald’s brother. The story may be told in Lockhart’s[220] words: Heber “had just been declared the successful competitor for that year’s poetical prize, and read to Scott at breakfast in Brazen Nose College the MS. of his _Palestine_. Scott observed that in the verses on Solomon’s Temple one striking circumstance had escaped him, namely that no tools were used in its erection. Reginald retired for a few minutes to the corner of the room, and returned with the beautiful lines-- ‘No hammer fell, no ponderous axes rung; Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung, Majestic silence!’”[221] In connection with this literary and social side of the College may be mentioned the Phœnix Common-room or Club, the only social Club in the University which is more than a century old. It was started in 1781 or 1782 by Joseph Alderson, an undergraduate of Brasenose, afterwards Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and received a full constitution with officers and rules in 1786. It has always nominally consisted of twelve members, generally dining together once a week. The records of the Club are singularly complete, even to the caricatures on the blotting-paper of the dinner-books. Of the twelve original members five were soon elected to Fellowships, and such names as Frodsham Hodson (afterwards Principal), Viscount Valentia (_d._ 1844), Earl Fortescue (_d._ 1861), Reginald Heber (Bishop of Calcutta), Lord George Grenville (_d._ 1850), the Earl of Delawarr, the friend of Byron, Richard Harington (afterwards Principal), Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne (“S. G. O.”), and the present Deans of Rochester and Worcester, have raised it to no ordinary level. Its contemporary from 1828 to 1834, the Hell-fire Club, was of a very different character; but from one or two dubious incidents in its career has found its way into literature.[222] The incident which produced from the pen of Reginald Heber the humorous poem entitled the _Whippiad_[223] was connected with members of the Phœnix, though not with a meeting of the Club. The Senior Tutor had incautiously endeavoured to wrest a whip from Bernard Port, who had been loudly cracking it in the quadrangle; but alas, the representative of constitutional authority soon measured his length on the grass, being, not for the first time (as Heber maliciously notes) “floored by Port.”