ABSTRACT
WILLIAM ADDIS, 1844—1917 William Edward Addis was a contemporary of Hopkins at Balliol and his most intimate Oxford friend. 'Of many letters some of them very long which Hopkins wrote to me I have not, alas! kept even one', he wrote to Fr Joseph Keating, S.J., in 1909. He was received into the Roman Catholic Church at St Mary of the Angels, Bayswater in October 1866, about a fortnight before Hopkins, and confirmed there by Cardinal Manning, together with Hopkins and Alexander Wood, on 4 November 1866. The son of a Free Church minister of Edinburgh, he was educated at Merchiston Castle School and Glasgow University and went up to Balliol as a Snell Exhibitioner in 1861, two years before Hopkins. Eike Hopkins, he took first classes in Mods and Greats. He appears frequently in Hopkins's Diaries and Journal. Hopkins sent him two of his sonnets in 1865; they went on frequent walks together; and shared lodgings at 18 New Inn Hall Street in the Easter Term 1866. On a walking-tour together in June 1866 they visited the Benedictine Monastery at Belmont, Herefordshire.
