Charles Kingsley at Cambridge

That Magdalene College should commemorate the centenary of a celebrated son is generous, in two ways. First, because modern England owes a felt debt to Newman, whether it is to Cardinal Newman or only Mr Newman; and since the quarrel between Kingsley and Newman still reverberates out of the Victorian age like the quarrel between Wilberforce and Huxley, anyone who feels any kind of debt to Newman is bound to have less than the highest natural sympathy for Kingsley. The second reason is that Kingsley's attitude to his own college was at one time so tense with contempt, and diis contempt expressed publicly, and read in all the middle-class homes of England, that the contemporary fellows of the college might be pardoned for being tepid when in i860 he came back to Cambridge as a don.