Those who are old enough to remember anything of the social aspects of Oxford at that day, and indeed any who have read the excellent biography of Archbishop Whately by his daughter, know that he was exceedingly unpopular among “the dons,” his contemporaries. This was due partly to the opinions he held on matters social, political, and religious, partly to those which prejudiced minds far inferior to his own supposed him to hold, but partly also to his own personal ways and manners. I think I know, and indeed I think I knew when I was his pupil, enough of the fibre and calibre of his mind to feel sure that he was greatly the intellectual superior to most of those of similar position around him. And I suppose that the world in general has by this time come to the conclusion that in respect of most of those opinions, which were then most obnoxious to the world in which he lived, Whately was right and his adversaries wrong. But he was not the man to win acceptance for new ideas in any society. The temper of his mind was in a high degree autocratical. He was born to be a benevolent and beneficent despot. His daughter, speaking of the painful experiences that awaited him when he became Archbishop of Dublin, says that “opposition was painful to his disposition.” Doubtless the Principal of Alban Hall, thoroughly congenial to him as was at that time the social atmosphere of the common room of his own Oriel, would have felt himself much out of his element in most of the common rooms of Oxford. I remember a dear old man, Dr. Johnson, of Magdalen, who was greatly beloved by his own society, and an universal favourite with all who knew him. He was a high, though not altogether dry, right divine man (_divino_ rightly spelled, be it understood, and not with an “e,” as in _jure de vino_), and used to maintain that the lineal descendants of the last Stuarts were still the rightful sovereigns of England. Sometimes a knot of youngsters would cluster around him, with, “But now, Dr. Johnson, do you really and truly believe that the present Duke of Modena is your lawful sovereign?” “Well, boy,” the doctor would say when thus pressed, “_after dinner I do_.” This was not the sort of man whom Whately would have tolerated, for though full of wit, as I have said, he was utterly devoid of any tincture of humour. Those were the days when it used to be said that the rule at Magdalen respecting preferment tenable together with a fellowship, was, “Hold your tongue, and you may hold any thing else.”