with his pupils, than he could be about the abstract question of the Pope's supremacy. The more certain duty eclipses the less; and as a mere layman he had no particular call to certify himself more securely on so very inconvenient a point. Nevertheless, though he took the oath himself, he sometimes saved others from doing so. "I knew him at Oxford," says Parsons, "and it was through him that the oath was not tendered to me when I took my M.A. degree.'

Still, however loth, he was obliged, by the statutes of the college, to enter on the study of theology; but he managed to find a respite, and to stave off the urgent questions. He began with natural theology, and read it up from Aristotle-Aristotle says nothing about the Pope's supremacy. Then he went on to positive theology, the old settled dogma, which had not much to do with controversies of the day. Then he determined to spell through the Fathers, where he could not expect to find much about these crabbed points; this I gather from his own statement: "First I learned grammar in my native place; then I went to Oxford, where I studied philosophy for seven years (1557-1564), and theology for about sixAristotle, Positive Theology, and the Fathers."+

After he had taken his degree he had hosts of pupils, who followed not only his teaching but his example, and imitated not only his phrases but his gait. He filled Oxford with "Campionists;" he became, like Hotspur, the glass wherein the youth did dress themselves, whose speech, gait, and diet was the copy and book that fashioned others. Among these Campionists was Robert Turner, afterwards rector of the University of Ingoldstadt, who speaks of his master as the one qui stilum meum, prius disjectum et libere effluentem extra oram artis † See Note E.

* See Note D.

et rationis, redegit in quadrum, aut aptius ad normam hanc rectam exegit; he had pinched up, and pulled out, and squared into shape his pupil's slovenly style. Another was Richard Stanihurst, poet, historian, and divine; and another, Henry, son of Lord Vaux of Harrowden. None of them approach their master in his brief and brilliant phrases, and forcible and lifelike epithets; but they gathered round him and formed a classical public, a brotherhood of scholars, to excite, to appreciate, and to applaud.

St. John's College was at that time a nursery for Catholics. The founder, Sir Thomas White, a Catholic, who as Lord Mayor of London in 1553 had done good service against Sir Thomas Wyatt's rebellion, and who in Elizabeth's first Parliament had protested that "it was unjust that a religion begun in such a miraculous way, and established by such grave men, should be abolished by a set of beardless boys," was still alive to superintend its foundation. When Elizabeth abolished the Mass, Dr. Alexander Belsire, whom Sir Thomas had appointed first president of his college in 1555, was deprived by the Royal Commissioners, for. Popery, in 1559 or 1560; and then White took away all the crucifixes, vestments, and holy vessels that he had given, and hid them in his house, to be restored in happier times. Belsire's successor, Dr. William Ely, who was elected by the scholars and confirmed by White, was as much a Catholic as his predecessor; but he managed to hold his post till 1563 without acknowledging the queen's supremacy. In that year the oath was tendered to him, and he was ejected. William Stock, Principal of Gloucester Hall, succeeded Ely, but was also ejected in a year for Popery. In 1564 Sir Thomas White made John Robinson president; he remained so

* See Note F.

for eight years, till July, 1572, when, White being dead, and the Puritan Horne, Bishop of Winchester, having succeeded in upsetting White's arrangement which deprived the Bishops of that see of the visitation of the college and vested it in trustees, of whom one of the first was to have been William Roper, the descendant of Sir Thomas More,* the character of the college underwent a complete change. Tobie Mathew was made president (1572), the suspected Papists (nine out of twenty) were ejected from the fellowships, and their places were filled by Puritans. Such is always the end of attempts to graft Catholic institutions upon the Establishment; a generous impulse is called forth, foundations more or less liberal are made, matters go on well while the personal presence of the founder overlooks them; but when he dies, his spirit departs, and his foundation reverts to the true representatives of Anglicanism, the High Churchman or the Puritan. The unsoundness of the constitution which requires the constant supervision of a man of genius, is shown by its collapse under his successors. There is no sure or lasting home for any thing Catholic in the Establishment. It would be ridiculous to look for the spirit of Sir Thomas White, or of Edmund Campion, in the present society of St. John's College, Oxford.

In the times I am speaking of, that society, if we may believe Yepes, Bishop of Tarracona, never would have the Lord's Supper celebrated in their chapel, nor would go elsewhere in search of it. If they had not the same objection to the Common Prayer, they avoided all topics of religious dispute, devoted themselves to philosophy and scholarship, and made Campion promise not to compromise himself in his public disputations. They were all waiting for something to turn up; waiting like the drunken

See Note G.

man for the door to come round to them, instead of shaking off their lethargy and walking out through the open door. They were waiting for Burghley to die, or for Elizabeth to die or to marry a Catholic husband, or for the King of Spain to come and depose her; waiting for fortune to change for them, instead of trying to change their own fortune; and forgetting that fate unresisted overcomes us, but is conquered by resistance. It was this English dilatoriness, this provisional acquiescence in wrong, this stretching of the conscience in order that men might keep what they had, which made it possible that England should be lost to the Church, as it has since lost many a man who was quite convinced that he ought to be a Catholic, but waited till his conviction faded away. The Catholics waited for the times to mend; and they waited till their children were brought up to curse the religion of their fathers, till they had been robbed piecemeal of their wealth and power, and found themselves a waning sect in the land they had once occupied from sea to sea.

Campion's first public oratorical display at Oxford was in 1560, at the re-burial of Amy Robsart, Robert Dudley's murdered wife, who had been hastily stowed away at Cumnor: but the people muttered that her husband had caused Foster, his servant, to throw her down-stairs and break her neck, in order that he might enjoy the Queen's favours more freely, as afterwards he did during his whole life. So Dudley thought it best to display his love and grief by a magnificent funeral in St. Mary's Church, Oxford, when his chaplain, Dr. Babington,* made her funeral oration. But either more than one oration was made over her grave, or the event was commemorated in the different colleges; for Parsons says that "Edmund Campion was chosen, though then very young, to make

* See Note H.

an English oration in her funerals, which he performed with exceeding commendation of all who were present." I have already mentioned his successes in February, 1564. In the same year Sir Thomas White died, and, in conformity with his will, his body was brought from London to Oxford, "with great celebrity and a marvellous concourse of people, on account of the fame of his virtues and charities;" and because he was a known Catholic, and had done much to defend and advance his religion, therefore (says Parsons) Campion was chosen to make the funeral oration in Latin; and in it he so well "improved" the alms-deeds of Sir Thomas, "that he wonderfully moved his audience to esteem such pious deeds," and "appalled much for many days the newfangled preachers of that time," who used to disparage the merit of good works, and had not yet arrived even at the moderate Anglican view, that a few of them do no harm.*

A copy of this oration is preserved at Stonyhurst; it is in very idiomatic and elegant Latin, and my translated extracts give no idea of its excellence. The author begins with a rhetorical picture of the grief of the thirty towns which White's munificence had enriched, and then turns to the simplicity which governed this liberality. "What magnificent generosity it was for a wholly unlettered man to found this great home of literature, for a man without learning to patronise the learned, for a wealthy citizen to adopt so many strangers when he had no children of his own, and to give all he had to aliens !" He enlarges on White's childlessness, and declares that it was providential, not natural: "Wherefore? he was freed from this care that he might be wholly unencumbered for another; and this other care he so entirely * See Note I.