And for this reason, too, feelings were apt to be more keen and intense and personal than in the larger scenes of life; the man who was disliked or distrusted was so close to his neighbours that he was more irritating than if he had been obscured by a crowd; the man who attracted confidence and kindled enthusiasm, whose voice was continually in men's ears, and whose private conversation and life was something ever new in its sympathy and charm, created in those about him not mere admiration, but passionate friendship, or unreserved discipleship. And these feelings passed from individuals into parties; the small factions of a limited area. Men struck blows and loved and hated in those days in Oxford as they hardly did on the wider stage of London politics or general religious controversy. The conflicts which for a time turned Oxford into a kind of image of what Florence was in the days of Savonarola, with its nicknames, Puseyites, and Neomaniacs, and High and Dry, counterparts to the _Piagnoni_ and _Arrabbiati_, of the older strife, began around a student of retired habits, interested more than was usual at Oxford in abstruse philosophy, and the last person who might be expected to be the occasion of great dissensions in the University. Dr. Hampden was a man who, with no definite intentions of innovating on the received doctrines of the Church--indeed, as his sermons showed, with a full acceptance of them--had taken a very difficult subject for a course of Bampton Lectures, without at all fathoming its depth and reach, and had got into a serious scrape in consequence. Personally he was a man of serious but cold religion, having little sympathy with others, and consequently not able to attract any. His isolation during the whole of his career is remarkable; he attached no one, as Whately or Arnold attached men. His mind, which was a speculative one, was not one, in its own order, of the first class. He had not the grasp nor the subtlety necessary for his task. He had a certain power of statement, but little of co-ordination; he seems not to have had the power of seeing when his ideas were really irreconcilable, and he thought that simply by insisting on his distinctly orthodox statements he not only balanced, but neutralised, and did away with his distinctly unorthodox ones. He had read a good deal of Aristotle and something of the Schoolmen, which probably no one else in Oxford had done except Blanco White; and the temptation of having read what no one else knows anything about sometimes leads men to make an unprofitable use of their special knowledge, which they consider their monopoly.