The estrangement was inevitable; but both cherished the warmest feelings of affection, even though such a friendship had been broken.  But Oxford became distasteful to Williams, and he soon afterwards left it for Bisley and Stinchcombe, the living of his brother-in-law, Sir G. Prevost.  There he married (22d June 1842), and spent the remainder of his life devoting himself to the preparation of those devotional commentaries, which are still so well known.  He suffered for the greatest part of his life from a distressing and disabling chronic asthma—­from the time that he came back to Oxford as Fellow and Tutor—­and he died in 1865.  The old friends met once more shortly before Isaac Williams’s death; Newman came to see him, and at his departure Williams accompanied him to the station.

Isaac Williams wrote a great deal of poetry, first during his solitary curacy at Windrush, and afterwards at Oxford.  It was in a lower and sadder key than the Christian Year, which no doubt first inspired it; it wanted the elasticity and freshness and variety of Keble’s verse, and it was often careless in structure and wanting in concentration.  But it was the outpouring of a very beautiful mind, deeply impressed with the realities of failure in the Church and religion, as well as in human life, full of tenderness and pathetic sweetness, and seeking a vent for its feelings, and relief for its trouble, in calling up before itself the images of God’s goodness and kingdom of which nature and the world are full.  His poetry is a witness to the depth and earnestness and genuine delicacy of what seemed hard and narrow in the Bisley School; there are passages in it which are not easily forgotten; but it was not strong enough to arrest the excitement which soon set in, and with its continual obscurity and its want of finish it never had the recognition really due to its excellence.  Newman thought it too soft.  It certainly wanted the fire and boldness and directness which he threw into his own verse when he wrote; but serious earnestness and severity of tone it certainly did not want.

FOOTNOTES: 

[27] Mozley, Reminiscences, i. 18.

[28] I. Williams, MS. Memoir.

[29] I. Williams, MS. Memoir.

[30] The history of this famous Tract, No. 80, on Reserve in communicating Religious Knowledge, belongs to a later stage of the movement.

CHAPTER V

CHARLES MARRIOTT

Charles Marriott was a man who was drawn into the movement, almost in spite of himself, by the attraction of the character of the leaders, the greatness of its object, and the purity and nobleness of the motives which prompted it.  He was naturally a man of metaphysical mind, given almost from a child to abstract and indeed abstruse thought.[31] He had been a student of S.T.  Coleridge, whom the Oriel men disliked as a misty