friend — rather on the intellectual and scholarly side than the doctrinal — of the great men of Oxford who dated from the thirties, a correspondent, as readers of their biographies may remember, of Thomas Arnold, Pusey, Samuel Wilberforce, and others of like eminence.
The names I have mentioned may not at first sight appear to belong to one and the same intellectual category. But by intermediate links the extreme personalities were more or less connected, and as a whole they appeared to mo to give the intellectual tone to the place. They were all men and women with mental force of character enough to throw into the background what dogmatic or other differences there might be between them. In fact, in the earliest years covered by these reminiscences dogmatic or sectarian influences were not very pronounced among us. The Established Church was still comparatively somnolent. There were growing, but as yet not conspicuous, undercurrents of pietism; but Nonconformity, represented principally by the oldest Congregational Church in the town, was for a long time under the guidance of a scholarly pastor — William Davis — who made a mark among the readers of divinity in his time by his thoughtful essay on ‘ The ‘True Dignity of Human Nature.’
It was in a new church built to the westward of the old part of the town, that the distinctive Evangelicalism of the establishment first found a voice; but that voice, when it was heard, was potent enough to win a sufficient clientéle to keep out of the town for a long time the new High Churchism of the Oxford Movement. Hastings has never had a man like Frederick Robertson of Brighton; and at present, I believe, the Establishment there is divided between Evangelicalism and several shades of Ritualism. The more pronounced literary element of Hastings life in the forties and fifties — represented by the Norths, the Leigh-Smiths, and others who belonged to the same coterie—never found adequate expression in any Hastings pulpit.
The Roman Catholic convent and church had not, in my youth, been in existence long enough to become a centre of influence. By a stroke of good luck or by prophetic instinct, the Roman Catholics had secured a large piece of what was then merely agricultural land, midway between the new township of St. Leonards and the old town of Hastings, This land now occupies a most valuable central position in the largely developed modern borough.
I cannot omit a reference to school life at Hastings in the thirties and early forties. Several old endowments, which under new schemes have since been made the germs of a fully organised -
