Cardinal Manning had been the principal leader in the Oxford Debating Society till Mr. Gladstone appeared upon the scene. At once he and Gaskell became the leading Christ Church orators, and the great oratorical event of the time was Mr. Gladstone’s speech against the first Reform Bill. ‘Most of the speakers,’ writes Sir Francis Doyle, who was present on the occasion, ‘rose more or less above their ordinary level, but when Mr. Gladstone sat down we all of us felt that an epoch in our lives had arrived. It was certainly the finest speech of his that I ever heard. The effect produced by that great speech led to his being returned to Parliament as M.P. for Newark by the Tory Duke of Newcastle, who is remembered for his question, “May I not do what I like with my own?”’ To return to Mr. Gladstone’s career at the University. In 1831 he took a double first-class, and would easily have attained a Fellowship in any college where Fellowships depended upon a competitive examination. He held with Scott, the foremost scholar of the day, the second place in the Ireland for 1829. In that year a deputation from the Union of Cambridge went to Oxford to take part in a debate on the respective merits of Byron and Shelley. One of the Cambridge party was Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton. He writes: ‘The man that took me most was the youngest Gladstone, of Liverpool—I am sure a very superior person.’ On all he seems to have exercised a beneficial influence. He deprecated the example of the gentlemen commoners, and did much to check the pernicious habit prevalent at that time in the University, of over-indulgence in wine. His tutor was the Rev. Robert Briscoe. He also attended the lectures of the Rev. Dr. Benton on divinity and Dr. Pusey on Hebrew. He read classics privately with a tutor of the Bishop of St. Andrews. In 1830 he was at Cuddesdon Vicarage with a small reading-party, where he seems to have mastered Hooker’s ‘Ecclesiastical Polity.’ He founded and presided over an essay society called after his name, of which he was successively secretary and president. In his maiden speech at the Union in 1830 he defended Catholic emancipation; declared the Duke of Wellington’s Government unworthy of the confidence of the nation; opposed the removal of Jewish disabilities; and argued for the gradual emancipation of slavery rather than immediate abolition.