Aspects of Modern Oxford, by a Mere Don

If there is one subject on which the professedly non-reading undergraduate is nearly always eloquent it is the aggravation of his naturally hard lot by the examination system; that is, not only 'The Schools' themselves, but the ancillary organization of lectures, 'collections,' and college tuition in general; all which machinery, being intended to save him from himself and enable him to accomplish the ostensible purpose of his residence at the University, he very properly regards as an entirely unnecessary instrument of torture, designed and perfected by the gratuitous and malignant ingenuity of Dons, whose sole object is the oppression of undergraduates in general and himself in particular. He is obliged to attend lectures, at least occasionally. His tutors compel him to attempt to pass his University examination at a definite date; and then-adding insult to injury-actually reproach him or even send him down for his ill success, just as if he had not always demonstrated to them by repeated statements and constant proofs of incapacity that he had not the smallest intention of getting through! Small wonder, perhaps, that on returning from a highly unsatisfactory interview with the University examiners to a yet more exasperating colloquy with the authorities of his college, he should wish that fate had not matched him with the 'cosmic process' of the nineteenth century; and that it had been his happier lot to come up to Oxford in the days when examinations were not, and his remote ancestors got their degrees without any vain display of mere intellectual proficiency, or went down without them if they chose.

And yet, should the modern undergraduate take the trouble (which of course he never does) to acquaint himself with the statutes and ordinances which governed his University in the pre-examination period, he would find that even then the rose was not wholly devoid of thorns. Even then the powers that be had decreed that life should not be completely beer, nor altogether skittles. It is true that the student was probably less molested by his college; but the regulations of the University dealt far more hardly with him than they do at present. Under the statutes of Archbishop Laud, the University exercised those functions of teaching and general supervision which it has since in great part surrendered to its component colleges; and in theory the University was a hard task-mistress.

Attendance at professorial lectures was theoretically obligatory, and 'since not only reading and thought, but practice also, is of the greatest avail towards proficiency in learning,' it was required that the candidate for a degree should 'dispute' in the Schools at stated and frequent times during the whole course of his academic career. Beginning by listening to the disputations of his seniors (a custom which perhaps survives in the modern fashion which sometimes provides a 'gallery' at the ceremony of viva voce), he was as time went on required himself to maintain and publicly defend doctrines in a manner which would be highly embarrassing to his modern successor-'responding' at first to the arguments of the stater of a theory, and with riper wisdom being promoted to the position of Opponent.' This opposing and responding was termed 'doing generals.' 'Argufying' was the business of the University in the seventeenth century, and had been so for a long time.

On the memorable occasion of Queen Elizabeth's visit to Oxford in the year 1566, Her Majesty was entertained intermittently with disputations on the moon's influence on the tides, and the right of rebellion against bad government. Thus, Archbishop Laud required of the seventeenth-century undergraduate so many disputations before he became a sophista, and so many again before he could be admitted to the degree of Bachelor; and if the system had worked in practice as it was intended to do in theory, young Oxford would not have had an easy time of it. In the days of Antony Wood's undergraduate career exercises in the 'Schooles' were 'very good.' 'Philosophy disputations in Lent time, frequent in the Greek tongue; coursing very much, ending alwaies in blowes,' which Wood considers scandalous; but at least it shows the serious spirit of the disputants. But a University can always be trusted to temper the biting wind of oppressive regulations to its shorn alumni; and there can be no doubt that the comparative slackness and sleepiness of the eighteenth century-a somnolence which it is easy to exaggerate, but impossible altogether to deny-must have tended to wear the sharp corners off the academic curriculum. Indications that this was so are not wanting. After all, there must have been many ways of avoiding originality in a disputation. A writer in 'Terrae Filius' (1720) states the case as follows: -

'All students in the University who are above one year's standing, and have not taken their batchelor' (of arts) 'degree, are required by statute to be present at this awful solemnity' (disputation for a degree), 'which is designed for a public proof of the progress he has made in the art of reasoning; tho' in fact it is no more than a formal repetition of a set of syllogisms upon some ridiculous question in logick, which they get by rote, or, perhaps, only read out of their caps, which lie before them with their notes in them. These commodious sets of syllogisms are call'd strings, and descend from undergraduate to undergraduate, in regular succession; so that, when any candidate for a degree is to exercise his talent in argumentation, he has nothing else to do but to enquire amongst his friends for a string upon such-and-such a question.'

So, even in the early part of the present century, reverend persons proceeding to the degree of D.D. have been known to avail themselves of a thesis (or written harangue on some point of theology) not compiled by their unaided exertions, but kept among the archives of their college and passed round as occasion might require. If mature theologians have reconciled this with their consciences in the nineteenth, what may not have been possible to an undergraduate in the eighteenth century? Also, the functionary who stood in the place of the modern examiner was a very different kind of person from his successor-that incarnation of cold and impassive criticism; collusion between 'opponent' and 'respondent' must have been possible and frequent; and so far had things gone that the candidate for a degree was permitted to choose the 'Master' who was to examine him, and it appears to have been customary to invite your Master to dinner on the night preceding the final disputation. Witness 'Terrae Filius 'once more: -

'Most candidates get leave … to chuse their own examiners, who never fail to be their old cronies and toping companions… It is also well known to be the custom for the candidates either to present their examiners with a piece of gold, or to give them a handsome entertainment, and make them drunk, which they commonly do the night before examination, and some times keep them till morning, and so adjourn, cheek by jowl, from their drinking-room to the school, where they are to be examined.' The same author adds: 'This to me seems the great business of determination: to pay money and get drunk.'

Vicesimus Knox, who took his B.A. degree in 1775, is at pains to represent the whole process of so-called examination as an elaborate farce. 'Every candidate,' he says, 'is obliged to be examined in the whole circle of the sciences by three masters of arts, of his own choice.' Naturally, the temptation is too much for poor humanity. 'It is reckoned good management to get acquainted with two or three jolly young masters and supply them well with port previously to the examination.' Viva voce once put on this convivial footing, it is not surprising that 'the examiners and the candidate often converse on the last drinking bout, or on horses, or read the newspapers, or a novel, or divert themselves as well as they can till the clock strikes eleven, when all parties descend, and the testimonium is signed by the masters.' Under such circumstances it is obvious that the provisions of Archbishop Laud might be shorn of half their terrors. Even at an earlier period other methods of evasion were not wanting. As early as 1656, orders were made 'abolishing' the custom of candidates standing treat to examiners. In the statute which still prescribes the duties of the clericus universitatis, there is a clause threatening him with severe penalties-to the extent of paying a fine of ten shillings-should he so far misuse his especial charge, the University clock, as to 'retard and presently precipitate the course' of that venerable time-piece, 'in such a manner that the hours appointed for public exercises be unjustly shortened, to the harm and prejudice of the studious.' Moreover, we read in Wood that notice of examination was given by 'tickets stuck up on certaine public corners, which would be suddenly after taken downe' by the candidate's friends. To such straits and to such unworthy shifts could disputants be reduced by mere inability to find matter.

It has been said that attendance at professorial lectures was theoretically obligatory; but it is hardly necessary to point out that even serious students have occasionally dispensed with the duty of attending lectures; and it is more than whispered there have been occasions in recent centuries when it was not an audience only that was wanting. There are, of course, instances of both extremes. Rumour tells of a certain professor of anatomy, who, lacking a quorum, bade his servant 'bring out the skeleton, in order that I may be able to address you as "gentle*men*;"' but all professors have not been so conscientious. Gibbon goes so far as to assert that 'in the University of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have for these many years given up altogether the pretence of teaching,' and the Reverend James Hurdie does not much improve the matter, when he prepares to refute the historian's charge in his 'Vindication of Magdalen College.' So far as the College is concerned, the reverend gentleman has something of a case; but his defence of the University is not altogether satisfying. Some of the professors, no doubt, do lecture in a statutable manner. But 'the late noble but unfortunate Professor of Civil Law began his office with reading lectures, and only desisted for want of an audience' (a plausible excuse, were it not that some lecturers seem to have entertained peculiar ideas as to the constitution of an audience). 'Terrae Filius' has a story of a Professor of Divinity who came to his lecture-room, found to his surprise and displeasure, a band of intending hearers, and dismissed them straightway with the summary remark: 'Domini, vos non estis idonei auditores!' 'The present Professor, newly appointed (the author has heard it from the highest authority), means to read.' Moreover, 'the late Professor of Botany at one time did read.' In fact, as the 'Oxford Spy' observes in 1818: -

'Yet here the rays of Modern Science spread:
Professors are appointed, lectures read.
If none attend, or hear: not ours the blame,
Theirs is the folly-and be theirs the shame.'

It is evident that professorial lectures were not a wholly unbearable burden.

'It is recorded in the veracious chronicle of Herodotus that Sandoces, a Persian judge, had been crucified by Darius, on the charge of taking a bribe to determine a cause wrongly; but while he yet hung on the cross, Darius found by calculation that the good deeds of Sandoces towards the king's house were more numerous than his evil deeds, and so, confessing that he had acted with more haste than wisdom, he ordered him to be taken down and set at large.'

So when the Universities are at last confronted with that great Day of Reckoning which is continually held over their heads by external enemies, and which timorous friends are always trying to stave off by grudging concessions and half-hearted sympathy with Movements; when we are brought to the bar of that grand and final commission, which is once for all to purge Oxford and Cambridge of their last remnants of mediaevalism, and bring them into line with the marching columns of modern Democracy; when the judgment is set and the books are opened, we may hope that some extenuating circumstances may be found to set against the long enumeration of academic crimes. There will be no denying that Oxford has been the home of dead languages and undying prejudice. It will be admitted as only too true that Natural Science students were for many years compelled to learn a little Greek, and that colleges have not been prepared to sacrifice the greater part of their immoral revenues to the furtherance of University Extension; and we shall have to plead guilty to the damning charge of having returned two Tory members to several successive Parliaments. All this Oxford has done, and more; there is no getting out of it. Yet her counsel will be able to plead in her favour that once at least she has been found not retarding the rear, but actually leading the van of nineteenth-century progress; for it will hardly be denied that if the Universities did not invent the Examination System, at least they were among the first to welcome and to adapt it; and that if it had not been for the development of examinations, qualifying and competitive, at Oxford and Cambridge, the ranks of the Civil Service would have continued for many years longer to be recruited by the bad old method of nomination (commonly called jobbery and nepotism by the excluded), and society would, perhaps, never have realised that a knowledge of Chaucer is among the most desirable qualifications for an officer in Her Majesty's Army. Here, at least, the Universities have been privileged to set an example.

The Oxford examination system is practically contemporaneous with the century; the first regular class list having been published in 1807. The change was long in coming, and when it did come the face of the University was not revolutionised; if the alteration contained, as it undoubtedly did, the germs of a revolution which was to extend far beyond academic boundaries, it bore the aspect of a most desirable but most moderate reform. Instead of obtaining a degree by the obsolete process of perfunctory disputation, ambitious men were invited to offer certain books (classical works for the most part), and in these to undergo the ordeal of a written and oral examination; the oral part being at that time probably as important as the other. Sudden and violent changes are repugnant to all Englishmen, and more especially to the rulers of Universities, those homes of ancient tradition; and just as early railways found it difficult to escape from the form of the stage-coach and the old nomenclature of the road, so the new Final Honour School took over (so to speak) the plant of a system which it superseded. Viva voce was still (and is to the present day) important, because it was the direct successor of oral disputation. The candidate for a degree had obtained that distinction by a theoretical argument with three 'opponents' in the Schools; so now the opponents were represented by a nearly corresponding number of examiners, and the viva voce part of the examination was for a long time regarded as a contest of wit between the candidate and the questioner. Nor did the race for honours affect the great majority of the University as it does at present. It was intended for the talented few: it was not a matter of course that Tom, Dick, and Harry should go in for honours because their friends wished it, or because their college tutor wished to keep his college out of the evening papers. Candidates for honours were regarded as rather exceptional persons, and a brilliant performance in the Schools was regarded as a tolerably sure augury of success in life: a belief which was, perhaps, justified by facts then, but which-like most beliefs, dying hard-has unfortunately survived into a state of society where it is impossible to provide the assurance of a successful career for all and each of the eighty or hundred 'first-class' men whom the University annually presents to an unwelcoming world.

However small its beginnings it was inevitable that the recognition of intellect should exercise the greatest influence-though not immediately and obviously-on the future of the University. La carrière once ouverte aux talents-the fact being established and recognised that one man was intellectually not only as good as another, but a deal better-colleges could not help following the example set them; the first stirrings of 'inter-collegiate competition' began to be felt, and after forty years or so (for colleges generally proceed in these and similar matters with commendable caution, and it was only the earlier part of the nineteenth century after all) began the gradual abolition of 'close' scholarships and fellowships-those admirable endowments whereby the native of some specified county or town was provided with a competence for life, solely in virtue of the happy accident of birth. To disregard talent openly placarded and certificated was no longer possible. The most steady-going and venerable institutions began to be reanimated by the infusion of new blood, and to be pervaded by the newest and most 'dangerous' ideas.

Nor were the outside public slow to avail themselves after their manner of the changed state of things. The possessor of a University degree has at all times been regarded by less fortunate persons with a kind of superstitious awe, as one who has lived in mysterious precincts and practised curious (if not always useful) arts, and at first the title of 'Honourman,' implying that the holder belonged to a privileged few-élite of the élites-whom a University, itself learned, had delighted to honour for their learning, could inspire nothing less than reverence. Also the distinction was a very convenient one. The public is naturally only too glad to have any ready and satisfactory testimonial which may help as a method of selection among the host of applicants for its various employments; and here was a diploma signed by competent authorities and bearing no suspicion of fear or favour. Presently the public began to follow the lead of Oxford and Cambridge, and examine for itself, but that is another story: schoolmasters more especially have always kept a keen eye on the class list. So an intellectual distinction comes in time to have a commercial price, and this no doubt has had something (though, we will hope, not everything) to do with the increase in the number of 'Schools' and the growing facilities for obtaining so-called honours. But it is needless to observe that the multiplication of the article tends to the depreciation of its value. The First-class man, who was a potential Cabinet Minister or an embryo Archbishop at the beginning of the century, is now capable of descending to all kinds of employments. He does not indeed-being perhaps conscious of incapacity-serve as a waiter in a hotel, after the fashion of American students in the vacation, but he has been known to accept gratefully a post in a private school where his tenure of office depends largely on the form he shows in bowling to the second eleven.

Here in Oxford, though we still respect a 'First,' and though perhaps the greater part of our available educational capacity is devoted to the conversion of passmen into honourmen, there are signs that examinations are no longer quite regarded as the highest good and the chief object of existence. It is an age of specialism, and yet it is hard to mould the whole University system to suit the particular studies of every specialist. Multiply Final Schools as you will, 'the genuine student' with one engrossing interest will multiply far more quickly; and just as the athlete and non-reading man complains that the schools interrupt his amusements, the man who specialises on the pips of an orange, or who regards nothing in history worth reading except a period of two years and six months in the later Byzantine empire, will pathetically lament that examinations are interrupting his real work. Are men made for the Schools, or the Schools for men? It is a continual problem; perhaps examinations are only a pis aller, and we must be content to wait till science instructs us how to gauge mental faculty by experiment without subjecting the philosopher to the ordeal of Latin Prose, and the 'pure scholar' to the test of a possibly useless acquaintance with the true inwardness of Hegelianism. After all it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that has to be considered, and the majority as yet are not special students. Moreover, there are various kinds of specialists. If 'general knowledge' (as has been said) is too often synonymous with 'particular ignorance,' it is equally true that specialism in one branch is sometimes not wholly unconnected with failure in another.

It was the severance of another link with the past when the scene of examinations was transferred from the 'Old Schools'-the purlieus of the Sheldonian and the Bodleian-to a new and perhaps unnecessarily palatial building in the High Street, which is as little in keeping with the dark, crumbling walls of its neighbour, University College, as the motley throng of examinees (pueri innuptaeque puellae) is out of harmony with the traditions of an age which did not recognise the necessity of female education. We have changed all that, and possibly the change is for the better, for while the atmosphere which pervaded the ancient dens now appropriated to the use of the great library was certainly academic, and was sometimes cool and pleasant in summer, the conditions of the game became almost intolerable in winter. Unless he would die under the process of examinations like the Chinese of story, the candidate must provide himself with greatcoats and rugs enough (it was said) to hide a 'crib,' or even a Liddell and Scott, for the proximity of the Bodleian forbade any lighting or warming apparatus. But in the new examination schools comfort and luxury reign; rare marbles adorn even the least conspicuous corners, and the only survivals of antiquity are the ancient tables, which are popularly supposed to be contemporaneous with the examination system, and are bescrawled and bescratched with every possible variety of inscription and hieroglyphic-from adaptations of verses in the Psalms to a list of possible Derby winners-from a caricature of the 'invigilating' examiner to a sentimental but unflattering reminiscence of one's partner at last night's dance. Here they sit, a remarkable medley, all sorts, conditions, and even ages of men, herded together as they probably never will be again in after-life: undeserving talent cheek by jowl with meritorious dulness; callow youth fresh from the rod of the schoolmaster, and mature age with a family waiting anxiously outside; and a minority of the fairer sex, whose presence is rather embarrassing to examiners who do not see their way to dealing with possible hysteria. And in the evening they will return-if it is Commemoration week; the venerable tables will be cleared away, and the 'Scholae Magnae Borealis et Australis' will be used for the more desirable purpose of dancing. Is it merely soft nothings that the Christ Church undergraduate is whispering to that young lady from Somerville Hall, as they 'sit out' the lancers in the romantic light of several hundred Chinese lanterns? Not at all; they are comparing notes about their viva voce in history.

V-UNIVERSITY JOURNALISM

'I only wish my critics had to write
A High-class Paper!'

    Anon.
The business of those who teach in the Universities is to criticise mistakes, and criticism of style has two results for the master and the scholar. It may produce that straining after correctness in small matters which the cold world calls pedantry; and in the case of those who are not content only to observe, but are afflicted with a desire to produce, criticism of style takes the form of parody or imitation; for a good parody or a good imitation of an author's manner is an object-lesson in criticism. Hence it is that that same intolerance of error which makes members of a University slow in the production of really great works stimulates the genesis of ephemeral and mostly imitative literature. The more Oxford concerns herself with literary style, the more she is likely in her less serious moods to ape the manner of contemporary literature. It all comes, in the first instance, of being taught to copy Sophocles and travesty Virgil. Ephemeral literature, then, at the Universities has always been essentially imitative. In the last century, when it was the fashion to be classical-and when as in the earlier poems of Mr. Barry Lyndon, 'Sol bedecked the verdant mead, or pallid Luna shed her ray'-Oxonian minor poets imitated the London wits and sang the charms of the local belles under the sobriquets of Chloe and Delia, and academic essayists copied the manner of the 'Spectator,' and hit off the weaknesses of their friends, Androtion and Clearchus; and now that the world has come to be ruled by newspapers, it is only natural that the style and the methods of the daily and weekly press should in some degree affect the lighter literature of Universities, and that not only undergraduates, who are naturally imitative, but even dons, who might be supposed to know better, should find themselves contributing to and redacting publications which are conducted more or less on the lines of the 'new journalism.'

Oxford has been slow to develop in this particular direction, and the reasons are not far to seek. The conditions just now are exceptionally favourable-that is, a cacoëthes scribendi has coincided with abundance of matter to write about, but the organs of the great external world naturally provide a model for the writer. But it is only recently that these causes have been all together present and operative, and the absence of one or more of them has at different times been as effectual as the absence of all. In the early part of the present century there can have been no lack of matter: University reform was at least in the air, athletics were developing, the examination system was already in full swing. But for some reason the tendency of the University was not in the direction of the production of ephemeral or at least frivolous literature. The pompous Toryism of University authorities seventy years ago did not encourage any intellectual activity unconnected with the regular curriculum of the student, and when intellectual activity began to develop, it was rather on the lines of theological discussion-the subjects were hardly fitted for the columns of a newspaper. At an earlier date the Vice-Chancellor was interviewed by the delegate of an aspiring clique of undergraduates, who wished to form a literary club and to obtain the sanction of authority for its formation. He refused to grant the society any formal recognition, on the ground that while it was true that the statutes did not absolutely forbid such things, they certainly did not specifically mention them; and the members of the club-when it was eventually founded independent of the Vice-Chancellarial auspices-were known among their friends as the 'Lunatics.' Such was the somewhat obscurantist temper of the University about the year 1820; and we can imagine that the Vice-Chancellor, who could find nothing in the statutes encouraging a debating society, would not have looked with enthusiastic approbation on a newspaper designed to discuss University matters without respect for authority. Even if he had, it would have been hard to appeal to all sections of the community; though there was certainly more general activity in the University than formerly, the gaudia anddiscursus of undergraduates were matters of comparatively small importance to their friends, and of none at all to their pastors and masters.

In the earlier part of the eighteenth century the conditions were exactly reversed. To judge from the specimens that have survived to the present day (and how much of our own lighter literature will be in evidence 170 years hence?) there must have been plenty of 'available talent.' It was an age of essayists. Addison and Steele set the fashion for the metropolis: and as has been said before, Oxford satirists followed at some distance in the wake of these giants. The form of 'Terrae Filius' is that of the 'Tatler' and 'Spectator,' and the 'Oxford Magazine' of that day is largely composed of essays on men, women, and manners; many are still quite readable, and most have been recognised as remarkably smart in their day. Nor is it only in professed and formal satire that the talent of the time displays itself. Thomas Hearne of the Bodleian was careful to keep a voluminous note-book, chronicling not only the 'plums' extracted by his daily researches from the dark recesses of the library, but also various anecdotes, scandalous or respectable, of his contemporaries; and one is tempted to regret that so admirable a talent for bepraising his friends and libelling his enemies should be comparatively perdu among extracts from 'Schoppius de Arte Critica,' copies of church brasses, and such-like antiquarian lumber-the whole forming a 'Collection' only recently published for the world's edification by the Oxford Historical Society. His 'appreciations' would have made the fortune of any paper relying for its main interest on personalities, after the fashion which we are learning from the Americans. 'Descriptions of his friends and enemies, such as 'An extravagant, haughty, loose man,' 'a Dull, Stupid, whiggish Companion,' are frequent and free; and anecdotes of obscure college scandal abound. We read how the 'Snivelling, conceited, and ignorant, as well as Fanatical Vice-Principal of St. Edmund Hall … sconc'd two gentlemen, which is a Plain Indication of his Furious Temper;' and how 'Mr. – of Christ Church last Easter-day, under pretence of being ill, desired one of the other chaplains to read Prayers for him: which accordingly was done. Yet such was the impudence of the man that he appeared in the Hall at dinner!'

As it was, however, those very collections which exhibit Hearne's peculiar genius show us at the same time how impossible, even granting the supposition to be not altogether anachronistic, a regular University 'News-letter' would have been. We talk now in a vague and, perhaps, rather unintelligible fashion of 'University politics,' and in some way contrive to identify Gladstonianism with a susceptibility to the claims of a school of English literature, or whatever is the latest phrase of progress-mixing up internal legislation with the external politics of the great world. But in Hearne's time there were no University politics to discuss. 'Their toasts,' says Gibbon of the Fellows of Magdalen College, 'were not expressive of the most lively loyalty to the House of Hanover,' and Hearne's interest in politics has nothing to do with the Hebdomadal Council. When he speaks of 'our white-liver'd Professor, Dr. – ,' or describes the highest official in the University as 'old Smooth-boots, the Vice-Chancellor,' it is generally for the very sufficient reason that the person in question is what Dr. Johnson called a 'vile Whig.' But Tory politics and common-room scandal and jobbery apart, the University would appear to have slept the sleep of the unjust. 'Terrae Filius' grumbles at the corrupt method of 'examination,' and 'The Student' is lively and satirical on the peccadilloes and escapades of various members of society. But your prose essayist is apt to be intermittent, and the publication that relies mainly on him leans on a breaking reed; so that we can hardly be surprised that the last-named periodical should eke out its pages with imitations of Tibullus, to the first of which the Editor appends the encouraging note, 'If this is approved by the publick, the Author will occasionally oblige us with more Elegiesin the same style and manner.'

Now that every one is anxious to see his own name and his friend's name in print, and that the general public takes, or pretends to take, a keen interest in the details of every cricket-match and boat-race, a paper chronicling University matters cannot complain of the smallness of its clientèle. Every one wants news. The undergraduate who has made a speech at the Union, or a century for his college second eleven, wants a printed certificate of his glorious achievements. Dons, and undergraduates too, for that matter, are anxious to read about the last hint of a possible Commission or the newest thing in University Extension. Men who have gone down but a short time ago are still interested in the doings of the (of course degenerate) remnant who are left; and even the non-academic Oxford residents, a large and increasing class, are on the watch for some glimpse of University doings, and some distant echo of common-room gossip. Modern journalism appeals more or less to all these classes; it cannot complain of the want of an audience, nor, on the whole, of a want of news to satisfy it, and certainly an Oxford organ cannot lack models for imitation, or awful examples to avoid. It is, in fact, the very multiplicity of contemporary periodicals that is the source of difficulty. A paper conducted in the provinces by amateurs-that is, by persons who have also other things to do-is always on its probation. The fierce light of the opinion of a limited public is continually beating on it. Its contributors should do everything a little better than the hirelings of the merely professional organs of the unlearned metropolis; its leaders must be more judicious than those of the 'Times,' its occasional notes a little more spicy than Mr. Labouchere's, and its reviews a little more learned than those of the 'Journal of Philology.' Should it fall short of perfection in any of these branches, it 'has no reason for existence,' and is in fact described as 'probably moribund.' Yet another terror is added to the life of an Oxford editor: he must be at least often 'funny;' he must endeavour in some sort to carry out the great traditions of the 'Oxford Spectator' and the 'Shotover Papers;' and as the English public is generally best amused by personalities, he must be careful to observe the almost invisible line which separates the justifiable skit from the offensive attack. Now, the undergraduate contributor to the press is seldom successful as a humourist. He is occasionally violent and he is often-more especially after the festive season of Christmas-addicted to sentimental verse; but for mere frivolity and 'lightness of touch' it is safer to apply to his tutor.

It is a rather remarkable fact that almost all University papers-certainly all that have succeeded under the trying conditions of the game-have been managed and for the most part written, not by the exuberant vitality of undergraduate youth, but by the less interesting prudence of graduate maturity. It is remarkable, but not surprising. Undergraduate talent is occasionally brilliant, but is naturally transient. Generations succeed each other with such rapidity that the most capable editorial staff is vanishing into thin air just at the moment when a journal has reached the highest pitch of popularity. Moreover, amateur talent is always hard to deal with, as organizers of private theatricals know to their cost; and there is no member of society more capable of disappointing his friends at a critical moment than the amateur contributor to the press. Should the spirit move him, he will send four columns when the editor wants one; but if he is not in the vein, or happens to have something else to do, there is no promise so sacred and no threat so terrible as to persuade him to put pen to paper. If these are statements of general application, they are doubly true of undergraduates, who are always distracted by a too great diversity of occupations: Jones, whose power of intermittent satire has made him the terror of his Dons, has unaccountably taken to reading for the Schools; the poet, Smith, has gone into training for the Torpids; and Brown, whose 'Voces Populi in a Ladies' College' were to have been something quite too excruciatingly funny, has fallen in love in the vacation and will write nothing but bad poetry. Such are the trials of the editor who drives an undergraduate team; and hence it comes about that the steady-going periodicals for which the public can pay a yearly subscription in advance, with the prospect of seeing at any rate half the value of its money, are principally controlled by graduates. No doubt they sometimes preserve a certain appearance of youthful vigour by worshipping undergraduate talent, and using the word 'Donnish' as often and as contemptuously as possible.

Nevertheless, there appear from time to time various ephemeral and meteoric publications, edited by junior members of the University. They waste the editor's valuable time, no doubt; and yet he is learning a lesson which may, perhaps, be useful to him in after-life; for it is said that until he is undeceived by hard experience, every man is born with the conviction that he can do three things-drive a dog-cart, sail a boat, and edit a paper.

VI-THE UNIVERSITY AS SEEN FROM OUTSIDE

'A man must serve his time to every trade
Save censure-critics all are ready made.'

    Byron.
It has been said that the function of a University is to criticise; but the proposition is at least equally true that Oxford and Cambridge are continually conjugating the verb in the passive. We-and more especially we who live in Oxford, for the sister University apparently is either more virtuous or more skilful in concealing her peccadilloes from the public eye-enjoy the priceless advantage of possessing innumerable friends whose good nature is equalled by their frankness; and if we do not learn wisdom, that is not because the opportunity is not offered to us. It is true that our great governing body, the Hebdomadal Council, has hitherto preserved its independence by a prudent concealment of its deliberations: no reporter has ever as yet penetrated into that august assemblage; but whatever emerges to the light of day is seized upon with avidity. Debates in Convocation or even in Congregation (the latter body including only the resident Masters of Arts), although the subject may have been somewhat remote from the interests of the general public, and the number of the voters perhaps considerably increased by the frivolous reason that it was a wet afternoon, when there was nothing else to do than to govern the University-debates on every conceivable subject blush to find themselves reported the next morning almost in the greatest of daily papers; and perhaps the result of a division on the addition of one more Oriental language to Responsions, or one more crocket to a new pinnacle of St. Mary's Church, is even honoured by a leading article. This is highly gratifying to residents in the precincts of the University, but even to them it is now and then not altogether comprehensible. Nor is it only questions concerning the University as a whole which appeal to the external public; even college business and college scandal sometimes assume an unnatural importance. Years ago one of the tutors of a certain college was subjected to the venerable and now almost obsolete process of 'screwing up,' and some young gentlemen were rusticated for complicity in the offence. Even in academic circles the crime and its punishment were not supposed to be likely to interfere with the customary revolution of the solar system; but the editor of a London daily paper-and one, too, which was supposed to be more especially in touch with that great heart of the people which is well known to hold Universities in contempt-considered the incident so important as to publish a leading article with the remarkable exordium, 'Every one knew that Mr. – , of – College, would be screwed up some day!' Most of the abonnésof this journal must, it is to be feared, have blushed for their discreditable ignorance of Mr. – 's existence, not to mention that leaden-footed retribution which was dogging him to a merited doom.

It is hardly necessary to say that in nine cases out of ten comment on the proceedings of a learned University takes the form of censure: nor are censors far to seek. There are always plenty of young men more or less connected with the Press who have wrongs to avenge; who are only too glad to have an opportunity of 'scoring off' the college authority which did its best-perhaps unsuccessfully, but still with a manifest intention-to embitter their academic existence; or of branding once for all as reactionary and obscurantist the hide-bound regulations of a University which did not accord them the highest honours. In these cases accuracy of facts and statistics is seldom a matter of much importance. Generally speaking, you can say what you like about a college, or the University, without much fear of contradiction-provided that you abstain from mere personalities. For one thing, the cap is always fitted on some one else's head. It is not the business of St. Botolph's to concern itself with an attack which is obviously meant for St. Boniface: it is darkly whispered in the St. Boniface common-room that after all no one knows what actually does go on in St. Botolph's: and obviously neither of these venerable foundations can have anything to do with answering impeachments of the University and its financial system. Moreover, even if the Dons should rouse themselves from their usual torpor and attempt a defence, it is not very likely that the public will listen to them: any statement proceeding from an academic source being always regarded with the gravest suspicion. That is why 'any stick is good enough to beat the Universities,' and there are always plenty of sticks who are quite ready to perform the necessary castigation.

Moreover, these writers generally deal with a subject which is always interesting, because it is one on which every one has an opinion, and an opinion which is entitled to respect-the education of youth. Any one can pick holes in the University system of teaching and examination-'can strike a finger on the place, and say, "Thou ailest here and here,"'-or construct schemes of reform: more especially young men who have recently quitted their Alma Mater, and are therefore qualified to assert (as they do, and at times not without a certain plausibility) that she has failed to teach them anything.

That the British public, with so much to think about, should find time to be diverted by abuse of its seats of learning, is at first a little surprising; but there is no doubt that such satire has an agreeable piquancy, and for tolerably obvious reasons. English humour is generally of the personal kind, and needs a butt; a capacity in which all persons connected with education have from time immemorial been qualified to perform, ex officio(education being generally considered as an imparting of unnecessary and even harmful knowledge, and obviously dissociated from the pursuit of financial prosperity, both as regards the teachers and the taught): Shakespeare set the fashion, and Dickens and Thackeray have settled the hash of schoolmasters and college tutors for the next fifty years, at any rate. Schoolmasters, indeed, are becoming so important and prosperous a part of the community that they will probably be the first to reinstate themselves in the respect of the public; but Dons have more difficulties to contend against. They have seldom any prospect of opulence. Then, again, they suffer from the quasi-monastic character of colleges; they have inherited some of the railing accusations which used to be brought against monasteries. The voice of scandal-especially feminine scandal-is not likely to be long silent about celibate societies, and no Rudyard Kipling has yet arisen to plead on behalf of Fellows that they

'aren't no blackguards too,

But single men in barracks, most remarkable like you.'

Altogether the legend of 'monks,' 'port wine and prejudice,' 'dull and deep potations,' and all the rest of it, still damages Dons in the eyes of the general public. 'That's – College,' says the local guide to his sightseers, 'and there they sits, on their Turkey carpets, a-drinking of their Madeira, and Burgundy, and Tokay.' Such is, apparently, the impression still entertained by Society. And no doubt successive generations of Fellows who hunted four days a week, or, being in Orders, 'thanked Heaven that no one ever took themfor parsons,' did to a certain extent perpetuate the traditions of 'Bolton Abbey in the olden time.' Well, their day is over now. If the Fellow fin de siècle should ever venture to indulge in the sports of the field, he must pretend that he has met the hounds by accident; and even then he risks his reputation.

It is always pleasant, too, to be wiser than one's erstwhile pastors and masters. The pupil goes out into the great world; the teacher remains behind, and continues apparently to go on in his old and crusted errors. Outwardly the Universities do not change much, and it is easy to assume that the habits and ideas of their denizens do not change either. Thus it is that the young men of the 'National Observer,' coming back from a Saturday-to-Monday visit to a university which they never respected and are now entitled to despise, are moved to declare to the world the complete inutility of what they call the Futile Don. 'He is dead,' they say, 'quite dead;' and if he is, might not the poor relic of mortality be allowed in mere charity to lie peacefully entombed in his collegiate cloisters? Yet, after all, it is only among the great Anglo-Saxon race that the profession of teaching is without honour; and even among us it may be allowed that it is a mode of earning a pittance as decent and comparatively innocuous as another. We cannot, all of us, taste the fierce joys of writing for the daily or weekly press, and the barrister's 'crowded hours of glorious life' in the law courts would be more overcrowded than ever were not a few fainéantssuffered to moulder in the retirement of a university. Seriously, it was all very well for the young lions of the Press to denounce the torpor of Dons in the bad old days when colleges were close corporations-when Fellows inherited their bloated revenues without competition, and simply because they happened to be born in a particular corner of some rural district. But now that nearly every First-class man has the chance of election and would be a Fellow if he could, one is tempted to recall the ancient fable of the sour grapes. Or at least the esprits forts whom the University has reluctantly driven out into the great world might be grateful to her for saving them in spite of themselves from an existence of futile incapacity.

Probably as long as colleges exist in something like their present form-until the People takes a short way with them, abolishes common rooms and the Long Vacation, and pays college tutors by a system of 'results fees'-these things will continue to be said. Deans and Senior Tutors will never escape the stigma of torpor or incapacity. That quite respectable rhymester, Mr. Robert Montgomery (who, had he not been unlucky enough to cross the path of Lord Macaulay, might have lived and died and been forgotten as the author of metrical works not worse than many that have escaped the lash), has left to the world a long poem-of which the sentiments are always, and the rhymes usually, correct-entitled 'Oxford.' He has taken all Oxford life for his subject, Dons included; and this is how he describes the fate of College Tutors: -

'The dunce, the drone, the freshman or the fool,
'Tis theirs to counsel, teach, o'erawe, and rule!
Their only meed-some execrating word
To blight the hour when first their voice was heard.'

To a certain extent this is true in all ages. But there are worse things than mere sloth: this is not the measure of the crimes charged against college authorities. They-even such contemptible beings as they-are said to have the audacity to neglect untitled merit, and to truckle to the aristocracy. Every one knows Thackeray's terrible indictment of University snobs: Crump, the pompous dignitary (who, to do him justice, seriously thinks himself greater than the Czar of All the Russias), and Hugby, the tutor grovelling before the lordling who has played him a practical joke. Every one remembers how even the late Laureate gibbeted his Dons-how

'One
Discussed his tutor, rough to common men.
But honeying at the whisper of a lord:
And one the Master, as a rogue in grain,
Veneer'd with sanctimonious theory.'

No doubt Universities are not immaculate. There have been Tartuffes and tuft-hunters there, as in the great world. No doubt, too, it was very wrong to allow noblemen to wear badges of their rank, and take their degrees without examination (although the crime was a lesser one in the days before class-lists were, when even the untitled commoner became a Bachelor by dark and disreputable methods); but these things are not done any more. At this day there are probably few places where a title is less regarded than at Oxford or Cambridge. It is true that rumour asserts the existence of certain circles where, ceteris paribus, the virtuous proprietor of wealth and a handle to his name is welcomed with more effusion than the equally respectable, but less fortunate, holder of an eleemosynary exhibition. But, after all, even external Society, which regards tuft-hunting with just displeasure, does-it is said-continue to maintain these invidious distinctions when it is sending out invitations to dinner. The fact is that there are a great many peccadilloes in London which become crimes at the University.

Satire, however, does not confine itself to Dons: undergraduates come in for a share of it too, though in a different way. When the novelist condescends to depict the Fellow of a college, it is usually as a person more or less feeble, futile, and generally manqué. The Don can never be a hero, but neither is he qualified to play the part of villain; his virtues and his vices are all alike inadequate. If he is bad, his badness is rarely more than contemptible; if he is good, it is in a negative and passionless way, and the great rewards of life are, as a rule, considered as being out of his reach. But with the undergraduate the case is different. He-as we have said-is always in extremes: literature gives him the premier rôle either as hero or villain; but it is as the villain that he is the most interesting and picturesque. Satire and fiction generally describe him as an adept in vicious habits. So sings Mr. Robert Montgomery, with admirable propriety: -