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early one evening to pay my first visit to the theatre, and the care which I took to cover my tracks on my return. We had been brought up to regard the theatre as one of the devil’s most damnable haunts; I am sure my mother had never entered one in her life, and her scruples were fully shared by the old Puritan couple—a Dispensary Doctor and his wife—with whom I lodged. I must have been quite 16 when I took the plunge; the play was a now forgotten one of Robertson’s called “ Dreams,” and the heroine’s part was taken by Miss Madge Robertson— now Mrs. Kendal—whom I regarded with true moon-calf devotion. Ce nest que le premier pas ani coute , and after a time I became an habitual play-goer, i.e, by careful economy I saved up in the course of a fortnight the 2/- needed for a seat in the pit, and in order to secure a place in the front row I have often stood outside the door for one or even two hours.” k

    In another letter, two days’ later, he reverted to the impression made upon him by Miss Robertson. “ I believe that Mrs. Kendal... was the first woman I at all idealised,” he wrote: “ she was not really beautiful, but had a most alluring voice, and to a callow novice in the pit seemed almost more than human. But of course she was as remote as a star from one’s daily life.” l

    The end of Asquith’s schooldays meant the temporary end of his life in London. The summer of 1870 was the transition period. In July, a few days after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, he was delivering his already quoted address at his last City of London Founder’s Day, and receiving all the acclamation due to an unusually successful boy at the pinnacle of his school career. In October, when the French Empire had fallen and German troops had invested a Republican Paris, he went to Oxford.
    It was not only Asquith’s first term as a Balliol undergraduate. It was also Benjamin Jowett’s first term as Master of the college. Jowett, the most famous of Victorian Oxford figures, had been balked of this ambition sixteen years earlier when Dr. Scott had been elected over his head. This defeat was the beginning for Jowett of nearly decade of chagrin, controversy and bitterness, but it led to no such diminution of energy as had afflicted his almost equally notable contemporary, Mark Pattison, in similar circumstances. 1 By 1864 Jowett had established his supremacy in Balliol and had far more influence upon the affairs of the college than his rival in the Master’s Lodging. His election (on September 7th, 1870) was such a foregone conclusion that the occasion for it—Scott’s appointment to the Deanery of Rochester—arose directly out of a plot between Gladstone and Robert Lowe the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to make a vacancy for him.

1 Pattison was defeated for the Rectorship of Lincoln in 1851.

    Asquith, who was later to be regarded as the epitome of the Balliol man, therefore arrived at the college at the beginning of its most renowned Mastership. But the conjunction of events was not as significant as it looks. Balliol’s period of distinction began long before Jowett became Master and almost equally long before his influence became predominant. The change from an old foundation with undistinguished buildings and a Scottish connection into a great forcing house of late nineteenth and early twentieth century politicians, administrators, ecclesiastics and men of letters began with Bishop Parsons, who was elected in 1798. It continued apace under “ the Old Master,” Henry Jenkyns, whose reign lasted from 1819 to 1854. This undistinguished High Church Tory, notable principally for his small white pony, was an improbable figure to preside over a great period of reform and rehabilitation, yet somehow or other he allowed it to happen under him.
    “ No College in Oxford,” H. W. C. Davis was able to write of this period several decades later, “ has parted with the old tradition to the same extent as Balliol.