My attention had been diverted from the accuser, by my amazement at the accusation; but, as soon as I recovered my recollection, it seemed to me certain that I knew his face. The idea was seized with so much eagerness, and associations occurred so rapidly, that the figure of one of my companions, on the. night of the debauch when I first came to Oxford, rose full before me; though he had been absent from the university, so that till this day I had never seen him since. It was the very tutor of the Earl of Idford !

A train of the most tormenting suspicions rushed upon me. I soon learned, from inquiry, that he was intimate likewise with the president. Was not this a combination? What could it be else? This tutor was connected with the earl and the president; so was the latter with the bishop!

The whole plot, in its blackest hues, seemed developed.

My

My agitation was extreme. I ran from college to college, wherever I had acquaintance, repeating all I knew and much of what I suspected. Nor did I merely confine myself to narrative. I added threats, which, however impotent they might be, were not the less violent. One of my first projects was to seek personal satisfaction of the vile tutor, or if he refused to chastise him with inexorable severity; but this he had taken care to elude, by keeping out of the way.

My denunciations soon reached the ear of the president, and I was given to understand that, if I were not immediately silent, I should be expelled the university; and that a degree would never be granted me, till I had publicly retracted the opprobious words I had uttered. Distant consequences are easily defied. My blood was in a flame, and despising the menace, I publicly declared that my persecutors were as infamous as the tool they had employed; that I

should

should think it a disgrace to be a member of a body which could countenance proceedings so odiously wicked; that I spurned at every honour such a body could. confer; and that, with respect to expulsion, I would myself erase my name from the register in which it had unfortunately been entered.

How little is man aware that by in-. temperance he damns his own cause, and gives the face of seeming honesty to injustice itself! Vicious as the place. is, I myself could not abhor such proceedings more than many men in Oxford, would have done, had they believed the tale.

Fortune still continued in her wayward mood. On the heel of one perverse imp another often treads. While I remained at Oxford, which was but a few days after this event, the retailing of my wrongs was my chief employment; and in a coffee-room, to which I resorted for this purpose, the following advertisement.

in a London newspaper met my astonished.

eye!

THIS DAY IS PUBLISHED:

A DEFENCE OF THE THIRTY NINE ARTICLES:

BY THE

RIGHT REVEREND FATHER IN GOD ******
LORD BISHOP OF *

Injustice had by this time become so familiar to me that, scourged even to frenzy as I was, I sat rather stunned than transfixed by the blow. That this was the very defence of the articles I had written did not, with me, admit of a moment's doubt. Every thing I had heard or remarked, of this wicked but weak church governor, had afforded proof of his incapacity for such a task; yet the injustice, effrontery and vice of the act was what till seen could not have been believed!

Nor did its baseness end here. What could I suppose, but that the bishop. had been assiduously tampering with the

president;

president; that they and the earl were in a conspiracy against me; that this was the cause of the disgrace and insult put upon me; and that, having robbed me of my writings, there was a concerted and fixed plan to render me contemptible, take away my character, and devote me to ruin?

The longer I thought the more painful were the sensations that assaulted me. I had already been complaining to the whole city. Some few indeed seemed to credit me; but more to suspect; and none heard of iny treatment with that glowing detestation which my feelings required. Were I to tell this new tale, incredibly atrocious as it was, what would men think, but that I was a general calumniator, a frantic egotist, and a man dangerous to society? The total inability that I felt in myself, to obtain ample and immediate justice, almost drove me mad.

I had previously determined to quit

Oxford,