“The criminal priest accordingly, as he was led to the place of execution, was still to all effects and purposes a priest, with all the tremendous powers inherent in that character, of which nothing save formal ecclesiastical degradation could deprive him. Now it so happened, or perhaps was purposely arranged, that the way from the prison to the place of execution lay through the market place, where all the provisions of all sorts for the Sevillians for that day were exposed. And as the yet undegraded, and it must be feared unrepentant, priest passed among all the various displays of food thus spread out before him, the devil, seizing an opportunity rarely to be matched, entered into the unhappy priest’s mind, and prompted him to deal one last malicious, and sacrilegious, blow at the population about to witness his miserable end. Suddenly, in the mid-market, he stretched out his arms, and pronounced with a loud voice the uncancellable sacramental words, ‘HOC EST CORPUS!’ And all the contents of that vast market were instantaneously transubstantiated! All the food in Seville was forthwith unavailable for any baser than eucharistic purposes, and Seville had to observe the vindictive priest’s last day on earth as a very rigorous fast day!” Whether Blanco White told this as absolutely having occurred within his own knowledge, or only as a Seville legend, I do not know, but in any case the story is a good one. I have said that when I entered Alban Hall I was not in a position to obtain much profit from the classical lectures, the main object of which was to drive those who attended them through the examination for the “little go.” I was better able to pass that examination when I first went to Oxford, than when the time came for my doing so. But the examination in question required that the candidate for passing should take up either logic or Euclid (four books only, as I remember), and of neither of these did I know anything. And there the Alban Hall lectures profited me. The admirably lucid logic lectures of both the Principal and Vice-Principal to my surprise soon rendered the rationale of the science perfectly comprehensible to me, and even Aldrich became interesting. I selected logic for my “little go,” and Whately made me abundantly able to satisfy the examiners. But, as I said a few pages back, my membership of Alban Hall was, for more reasons than those which have been already given, disastrous to me, and the disaster came about in this wise.