As soon as the University met in January 1842, the contest for the Poetry Professorship was settled.  There was no meeting of Convocation, but a comparison of votes gave a majority of three to two to Mr. Garbett,[102] and Mr. Williams withdrew.  The Tractarians had been distinctly beaten; it was their first defeat as a party.  It seems as if this encouraged the Hebdomadal Board to a move, which would be felt as a blow against the Tractarians, and which, as an act of reparation to Dr. Hampden, would give satisfaction to the ablest section of their own supporters, the theological Liberals.  They proposed to repeal the disqualification which had been imposed on Dr. Hampden in 1836.  But they had miscalculated.  It was too evidently a move to take advantage of the recent Tractarian discomfiture to whitewash Dr. Hampden’s Liberalism.  The proposal, and the way in which it was made, roused a strong feeling among the residents; a request to withdraw it received the signatures not only of moderate Anglicans and independent men, like Mr. Francis Faber of Magdalen, Mr. Sewell, the Greswells, and Mr. W. Palmer of Worcester, but of Mr. Tait of Balliol, and Mr. Golightly.  Dr. Hampden’s own attitude did not help it.  There was great want of dignity in his ostentatious profession of orthodoxy and attachment to the Articles, in his emphatic adoption of Evangelical phraseology, and in his unmeasured denunciation of his opponents, and especially of those whom he viewed as most responsible for the censure of 1836—­the “Tractarians” or “Romanisers.”  And the difficulty with those who had passed and who now proposed to withdraw the censure, was that Dr. Hampden persistently and loudly declared that he had nothing to retract, and retracted nothing; and if it was right to pass it in 1836, it would not be right to withdraw it in 1842.  At the last moment, Mr. Tait and Mr. Piers Claughton of University made an attempt to get something from Dr. Hampden which might pass as a withdrawal of what was supposed to be dangerous in his Bampton Lectures; and there were some even among Mr. Newman’s friends, who, disliking from the first the form of the censure, might have found in such a withdrawal a reason for voting for its repeal.  But Dr. Hampden was obdurate.  The measure was pressed, and in June it was thrown out in Convocation by a majority of three to two[103]—­the same proportion, though in smaller numbers, as in the vote against Mr. Williams.  The measure was not an honest one on the part of the Hebdomadal Board, and deserved to be defeated.  Among the pamphlets which the discussion produced, two by Mr. James Mozley gave early evidence, by their force of statement and their trenchant logic, of the power with which he was to take part in the questions which agitated the University.