Oxford

VOLUME 161

NUMBER 6

JUNE 1938

BY LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH

MY flight from America occurred in 1888. My sister was by that time married and settled in London, and her barrister husband insisted with great emphasis that I should be transferred without delay to what was, in his opinion, the true focus of the civilization of Europe, the only nursing home of reasonable thought and noble ambition — in fact, to Balliol College. There the spirit of T. H. Green and of Arnold Toynbee was still potent, and there the great Benjamin Jowett still lived and reigned.

This had all been happily arranged, and the change from America to England, from a New York countinghouse to Oxford, seemed to me a piece of flawless good fortune. But there is a flaw, unluckily, as Emerson pointed out, in everything God has made; and I am inclined to believe now, as I muse in retrospect on these events of fifty years ago, that two slight incidents, though I saw no significance in them at the time, might without superstition be regarded as the first faint foreshadowings of the tiny rift or flaw which was destined to blemish the felicity of my residence in England.

Both are trivial matters, both absurd in character, the first hardly worth mentioning at all. I had reached London in advance of my luggage; my father and I were to dine the evening of our arrival with Lord and Lady Mount Temple in their great house in Stanhope Gate, and I appeared in those stately halls, at what was my first London dinner party, in dress clothes hired for the evening. My second false step was one the gravity of which Oxford men will appreciate — indeed, I shrink from mentioning it, even at the distance of fifty years. I was to travel to Oxford the next day to interview Benjamin Jowett, and I performed the journey by the NorthWestern railway from Euston Station — an unheard-of method of approach, which is nevertheless given in the railway guide as an alternative to the swift and direct journey by the Great Western from Paddington. Since the distances and prices were identical, how was I to know the gigantic, the unspeakable error of the route I chose?

The great Jowett, who had of course no notion that I came from Euston, received me kindly; the entrance examination to Balliol was, I must think, made easy for me, and I was taken at once into the pleasant household of A. L. Smith, later the Master of Balliol, to prepare for that examination to the University, or ‘Smalls,’ which no personal favor could modify or make easy. The little smattering of Latin and Greek which I acquired in America had faded from my mind; I was forced to begin again with the Greek alphabet. But I was anxious to learn, my tutor had a real genius for teaching, and in about three months’ time I acquired that minimum of classical learning which was then necessary for admission to the University, and took up my residence in Balliol.

Copyright 1938, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

II

I see myself as being at that time an easy, pleasant, well-meaning, plausible youth, older in years than my English comrades (for I was twenty-three), but in mind and education much cruder than almost any of them, though they were young and crude enough. I was the only or almost the only American in Oxford; for it was long before the great invasion had begun. I was liked, or, at any rate, I was kindly tolerated.

Jowett, as is well known, was the victim all his life of an absurd social shyness, a shyness he diffused about him like a kind of terror. To this I was, however, immune. I claim no credit for my lack of becoming awe; it was part of my American simplicity, and I can recall with a kind of amazement those dinner parties of his to which he would ask a few undergraduates to meet the distinguished guests who so often stayed with him. There, with their wives, were cabinet ministers who could face a howling House of Commons but could not face the Master; famous travelers who had looked at danger with unflinching eyes but who now were paralyzed with shyness — all were as frightened of the Master as he was terrified of them, all sat tongue-tied as in a nightmare.

It was very odd, but what seems to me now the oddest feature of these occasions is the fact that there was I, an undergraduate, a clerk released not many months before from a New York office, monopolizing the conversation. Among all those eminent people the only words which were heard were often spoken in my transatlantic accent. But being young, and inexperienced in the world, I regarded situations as simple which were full in fact of complications; hating to see people uncomfortable and embarrassed, I wanted to help them to feel at ease. My host must have been grateful to me, as he kept asking me to his parties; I remember once, when I stood looking across the chasm which yawned in his drawing-room between his London guests and the undergraduates invited in after dinner, I saw some London acquaintances of mine and stepped across the gulf to greet them, and the Master gave me a little pat on the back and murmured, ‘That’s a brave young gentleman.’

But the state of society I am describing must, I think, have vanished long ago. Eminent Englishmen now meet (except, perhaps, in royal circles) without undue embarrassment or shyness; since the death of Lord Kitchener I doubt if there is anyone who can make them shake in their shoes; and certainly the American accent is familiar, if not too familiar, to them all.

Who were the eminent personages I met at the Master’s dinner parties? That they were large is almost all I remember about them; I was too ignorant of contemporary life in England to attach much meaning to their names. They have faded from my memory with the exception of Lord Dufferin, of whom Harold Nicolson has just written a delightful portrait. I have a reason, somewhat beneath the dignity of history, to remember this ex-Viceroy of India, this ex-Governor-General of Canada, who was at the time, I believe, British Ambassador in France. On arriving at the Master’s I was presented to him and to his wife, who happened to make a gesture which struck me as rather odd. I paid, however, but little attention to it, as the Marquis immediately drew me aside and began talking to me in the manner full of fascination for which he was justly famous. I was naturally flattered by the way I had been singled out and drawn aside from the company upon which he turned his back, until I noticed that, while he talked he was busy adjusting his costume. The odd gesture of the Marchioness had plainly been an agreed signal of a misplaced ambassadorial button which it was her high concern to put right.

III

Jowett not only asked me to his dinner parties, but invited me also to stay with him in his Malvern cottage. I only knew him, of course, in his old age; his work was over, he was enjoying a deserved repose after the efforts and battles of his earlier career, and the worldly, disillusioned old man was by no means an inspiration to earnest youth. He had known so many idealists; he had been an idealist himself, and the gospel he preached had changed by now into a gospel of wet blanket. Aspirations expressed in his hearing met with no encouragement. ‘People are seldom better employed than in earning their own living’ was a favorite aphorism of his.

I remember the experience of a Balliol contemporary of mine whose ambition it was to devote himself to the pursuit of truth. His mother, perplexed by this odd notion of her offspring, came to Oxford and took her son with her to consult the Master on the project. The youth stammered out with the enthusiasm of youth this ideal of a life dedicated, like Spinoza’s, to the pursuit of truth; Jowett listened, looking like an old pink and white parrot. There was then a pause, in which mother and son waited anxiously for his verdict, which was ‘You can get it up to £900 a year, perhaps, but no more than that.’

Taking essays to read to Jowett, as in groups of two or three we used to take them, was a terrifying but also a most amusing experience. He would listen with his head cocked on one side, ready to peck at any fine sentiments or fine writing; and it was his favorite device to pretend that he had not heard the offending passage. ‘Read that again,’ he would request, more than once, in his squeaky voice; and then would come his comment.

I remember once, when Macaulay was the subject of the week’s essay, hearing a Scottish scholar of the college begin with a strong Scottish accent, ‘It is strange that anyone should have read so much and thought so little. It is strange that anyone should have done so much and lived so little.’ I thought this beginning full of promise, but Jowett, after insisting on its being read twice again, squeaked, ‘That sentence has no meaning; I must ask you to write your essay again from the very beginning.’

But once, rumor said, the Master had been completely nonplused; an undergraduate had begun his essay with the words, ‘All social reformers, from Socrates and Jesus Christ to Brad laugh and Annie Besant’ (who were best known at that time as advocates of atheism and birth control). ‘Read that again,’ snapped Jowett; it was read again, it was read three times, and then — the Master said nothing.

I grew really fond of Jowett, though he fell far short of my priggish approbation. Any earnest student who made the slightest slip was severely punished by him, while the drunken escapade of some rowdy aristocrat would meet with the mildest of reproofs. It was perhaps part of this mellow naughtiness of his that he seemed inclined to encourage my avowed intention to devote myself to the fine art of writing. It was an aspiration he had never before encountered; he had perhaps — who knows? — a secret sympathy with it, for he was a writer of admirable prose himself. Anyhow, he knew that such an ideal was absolutely not catching, and I dare say he was aware that the Balliol dons who were entrusted with my education would be annoyed by any such notion, and Jowett did not in the least mind annoying the earnest dons of Balliol.

But these dons of Balliol, these ‘Greats’ tutors who supervised my work for the Schools, though they were infinitely courteous and painstaking, had much more serious reasons for disliking me (as I am sure they did dislike me) than any fantastic desire of mine to be a writer. My mind, though they may have dimly hoped at first that it could be coached to win first-class honors for the college, must have seemed to them sadly lacking, as indeed it was, in discipline and training. I think that by a kind of instinct they realized that I had come to Oxford from Euston, and that no subsequent drilling could repair the error of this North-Western journey.

Sir Walter Raleigh describes in one of his letters a paper read in his research class at Oxford by a Rhodes Scholar. ‘It was empty, magniloquent, abstract, flatulent, pretentious, confused, and subhuman. I could have wept salt tears. But I could n’t do anything else; the young man wanted a clean heart and a new spirit, not a little top-dressing.’ All these adjectives would, I am sure, apply to the essays I used to read to these long-suffering tutors. They must have felt acutely my need of the clean heart and a new spirit, and so conscientiously did they attempt to supply me with them that now for the very first lime in my life I was, as we say, ‘up against it’— it was my first contact with real education, with the standards of real scholarship and thought.

IV

The Oxford School of Litterae humaniores — or ‘Greats,’ as it is called — seems to my mature judgment the best scheme of education that I have ever heard of. It is based upon an accurate knowledge of Greek and Latin texts, especially the texts of Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides and Tacitus, and the subjects studied in it are the eternal problems of thought, of conduct, and of social organization. These are discussed, not by means of contemporary catchwords, but by translating them back into another world and another language.

Nor could anything be more profitable from the pupils’ point of view than the way in which this scheme of education was carried on. The student would prepare a paper on some special subject and go with it, generally alone, and read it to his tutor, who would then discuss it and criticize it at length; or a group of two or three would meet in the tutor’s room for a kind of Socratic discussion of some special point. These discussions were carried on much in the spirit of the Socratic dialogues; and the Socratic irony and assumed ignorance of the instructors, their deferential questions, as if the pupil were the teacher and they the learners, were a method which I found it hard at first to understand.

I remember, for instance, in reading a paper to Nettleship, I mentioned the distinction between form and matter. ‘Excuse me for interrupting you,’ Nettleship said, ‘ but this distinction you make, though it is no doubt most important, is one that I find a little difficult to grasp — if it is not troubling you too much, it would be a real kindness if you would try to explain it to me.’

‘Oh, it’s quite simple,’ I answered patronizingly. ‘There’s the idea, say, in a poem, and there’s the way in which it is expressed.’

Nettleship still seemed puzzled. ‘Could you give me an instance?’ he pleaded.

‘Oh, nothing easier,’ I answered. ‘Take the lines, for instance, when Lovelace says,

I could not love thee, Dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Now he might have said, “I could n’t be nearly so fond of you, my dear, if I did n’t care still more for my reputation.” The form, you see, is very different in both these sentences, but the subject of them — what they mean — is exactly the same.’

Nettleship seemed greatly discouraged. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘I can’t see that the meaning of the two sentences is the same. I’m afraid I’m very stupid, but to me they seem to say quite different things.’

He was, I thought, curiously stupid, but in my patient attempt to make my meaning clearer to him a dim suspicion began to waken in me that perhaps it was not Nettleship but I myself who was playing the part of the fool in this dialogue.

V

The Oxford School of Greats and the Oxford tutorial system, which had been perfected by Jowett and which was seen at its very best in Balliol College, were exactly what I needed to knock out of me my pretentious superficiality; and if I have to any degree attained a ‘clean heart and new spirit’ I owe it to these years of careful tuition and personal guidance at Balliol. Yet I cannot but feel that this system of personal tuition involved an intolerable waste of fine material, and that it was a fantastic, almost a wicked thing that hours and hours of the time of men like Nettleship and Abbott and the other Greats tutors should have been devoted to the culture of an intellect so raw and crude as mine.

Nor can I believe that this patient, persistent instruction and spoon-feeding of individuals is the proper function of university teachers, or that, to the best minds already well grounded at school, such additional schoolmastering can be really beneficial. Universities should, it seems to me, be organized, not for the purpose of educating the second-rate and stupid, for transforming at infinite expense of labor the ears of sows into some poor semblance of silk purses, but for the enlightenment and development of the keenest intelligences, for the encouragement by example of original research. Daring and original minds are cramped and injured by being always led in strings and fed on pap which has been carefully prepared for them. They should be allowed to make their profitable mistakes; and, above all, their spirits should be kindled by contact with original scholars and masters of first-hand learning.

To any such ideal the hard-worked college tutor, who had generally begun tutoring the moment he had ceased to be a pupil, had, of course, no chance of attaining. Naturally he tended to depreciate those who had attempted to achieve this ideal, and he had not far to look for them.

There existed at Oxford, in a kind of shadowy world, a whole body of university professors, men of original learning and research, who were generally appointed from outside, and who lectured on the same subjects as the college tutors. But of all this I had not the slightest notion. My only intimation of it was when I was calling one day on the Regius Professor of History (whom I had met traveling in Sicily) and heard him tell his parlormaid to run over to his lecture room across St. Giles and see if there were any auditors assembled. In this case, the Professor told me, he would be compelled to attend himself. The maid soon brought back the accustomed news that the lecture room was completely empty, and so we were enabled to have our tea in peace.

My host’s predecessor, the great historian Stubbs, had undergone much the same neglect when he came to lecture in Oxford. The trouble was that professors would lecture on things that interested them, rather than provide information which might prove useful in those examinations in which the colleges competed fiercely with each other, and no college more fiercely than my own. Indeed, it might have easily happened in Oxford at this period (I don’t know how it would be now) that the greatest authority in the world might give a lecture on his special subject and not one of those tutors who taught that subject, or those undergraduates who were engaged in its study, would find it worth his while to attend the lecture. Certainly any desire to do so would have been seriously frowned upon in Balliol, as being likely to interfere with that triumph of Balliol over other colleges which was held before our eyes as the highest and noblest of university aims.

Balliol College, drunk with its triumph in the university examinations, had made success of this kind its glory and ideal, and the immense importance of gaining a first and thus helping to defeat and disconcert and keep down all rival colleges was continually impressed upon us. I remember receiving a dim impression of this passion when I read an essay on some special point in Roman history to my tutor. I had taken an unusual interest in this subject, which I had chosen for myself, and I had read and thought with special thoroughness about it. I was proud of my essay, and my tutor gave it unusual praise, in which praise I was conscious of the mingling of a curious ma lease.

’Yes,’he said, ‘this is an excellent piece of work, the best work of yours I have seen; if all your work were of this quality you might get a first, and do honor to your college. But I’m afraid that, after all, your time has been wasted. That question was asked by the examiners last year.’

This ideal of winning firsts in examinations for the glory of Balliol was so impressed upon me that though I have little college patriotism remaining, and an Oxford first has lost all its glory in my eyes, I still study in The Times the examination lists and count up the firsts achieved by the various colleges, and rejoice when, as almost always happens, I find that Balliol still maintains its old preëminence.

All the same, this spirit of competition between one college and another seems to me now more schoolboyish and absurd than most forms of patriotic sentiment, and I find it difficult to understand how serious and noble men like the Balliol dons could have been inspired by such childish ambitions, and done all they could — and they could do much — to inspire others with them. Of course the rational, judicious hatred I entertain for our rival university, Cambridge, being founded, as it is, on reason and free from prejudice of any kind, is quite another matter, and should not be so much as mentioned here.

VI

The other ideal strongly impressed upon Balliol undergraduates was the duty of getting on in the world, and indeed triumph in examinations was above all praised as the first step on the path to more important triumphs. It has been said of Jowett that he united with high moral and religious seriousness the plain determination that his pupils should not fail of mundane distinction, and, naughty as he may have become in other ways, at worldly success he never mocked.

There was much glorification on college occasions of the Balliol men who had achieved high honors and positions. College gaudies were gaudy indeed with the litany of glorious names recited on these occasions — names of viceroys, archbishops, cabinet members, even prime ministers who were sons of Balliol, and who not infrequently would return as grateful sons to their alma mater and shed their lustre upon each other, and on the college whence they had first winged their flights. To tell the truth, I came in the end to find these entertainments rather cloying to my taste, and though the roll call of Balliol names has grown with the years even more illustrious, I am inspired with no desire to listen to it. I am glad that members of my college have performed noble services in the world, and have been nobly rewarded by a grateful nation, but loud proclamations of these achievements and reiterated college boastings I find, to tell the truth, rather boring. I should more joyfully attend a gaudy for the black sheep of the college, the scapegraces and ne’er-do-wells; and if men of literary distinction like Matthew Arnold or Swinburne, or others famous for scholarly or literary research, had been praised on these occasions (which never happened) I should have listened with greater interest.

The word ‘research’ as a university ideal had, indeed, been ominously spoken in Oxford by that extremely cantankerous person, Mark Pattison, some years ago; but the notion of this ideal, threatening as it did to discredit the whole tutorial and examinational system which was making Oxford into the highest of high school for boys, was received then with anger and contempt. In Balliol, the birthplace and most illustrious home of this great system, it was regarded with especial scorn. If the prize fellowships and the fellowships at All Souls were to be no longer regarded as the legitimate reward of those who had won first classes in the Schools; if the means they provided were not to be spent in helping ambitious young men on the first rungs of the ladder of worldly success, but used, as Mark Pattison’s ill-mannered supporters suggested, in the maintenance of young researchers, ambitious of the fame of scholars, would not the whole tutorial system be deprived of one of its important features, and the university endowments be seriously abused?

This ideal of endowment for research was particularly shocking to Benjamin Jowett, the great inventor of the whole system which it threatened. I remember once, when staying with him at Malvern, inadvertently pronouncing the illomened word. ‘Research!’ the Master exclaimed. ‘Research!’ he said. ‘A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve, any results of the slightest value.’

At this sweeping statement I protested, whereupon I was peremptorily told, if I knew of any such results of value, to name them without delay. My ideas on the subject were by no means profound, and anyhow it is difficult to give definite instances of a general proposition at a moment’s notice. The only thing that came into my head was the recent discovery, of which I had read somewhere, that on striking a patient’s kneecap sharply he would give an involuntary kick, and that by the vigor or lack of vigor of this ‘knee jerk,’ as it is called, a judgment could be formed of his general state of health.

‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ Jowett replied. ‘Just give my knee a tap.’

I was extremely reluctant to perform this irreverent act upon his person, but the Master angrily insisted and the undergraduate could do nothing but obey. The little leg reacted with a vigor which almost alarmed me, and must, I think, have considerably disconcerted that elderly and eminent opponent of research.

VII

I fear that I have succumbed to my love of irony in writing of the tutorial system and Balliol and the Balliol dons. In all sincerity, however, I feel that I cannot be too grateful to those elderly courteous men, to Nettleship, Strachan Davidson, to Forbes and Abbott, for the unstinted trouble they took to give me the new heart I needed. For alt the purposes they cared for I was almost certainly useless: I could not be expected to add to the glory of Balliol either in the Schools or in the world of great affairs, and yet hour after hour they tutored me and listened, I will not say unweariedly, but at any rate without any manifestation of weariness, to my essays. Though I feel sure they did not like me, no sign of this ever appeared in the beautiful courtesy with which I was always treated by them.

Balliol gave me much, gave me some elements of real education, some tincture of the classics; from the spirit of high endeavor fostered in the college I was stimulated to feel that life was an opportunity for achievement, that there were laurels to be gathered and garlands to be run for. But the civic garlands which were prized in Balliol were not really objects of my ambition; I still wished to cultivate the art of letters, and no such notion was encouraged in that college. Indeed, save for a mild appreciation of music, there was at that time no interest in any of the arts in Balliol. The Master and Fellows had destroyed almost all the antique beauty of the college, building upon its ruins a hideous castle of the Philistines; and it was in this castle, where young Philistines were being trained to go forth and conquer and rule the kingdoms of the world, it was in this castle that I dwelt — high up, in fact, in one of its battlemented towers.

But to me, dwelling thus among the children of this world, and toiling with them for that success which leads to worldly advancement; to me, enmeshed as I was in all the social, political, and philanthropic interests of my companions, there floated through the Oxford air, there drifted over the college walls, a voice, whispering, as in the delicate cadences of the Oxford bells, enchantments very unlike anything I heard in the college lecture rooms or chapel. If you would save your soul, the voice seemed to whisper, if you would discover that personal and peculiar sense of life which is your most precious endowment, you must practise and perfect a habit of discrimination; amid all you hear and see you must choose whatever is relevant and significant to you, and only that, rejecting with equal sincerity everything that is not really yours — all the interests you catch from others, all the standards and beliefs and feelings which are imposed on you by the society and the age you live in. Watch above all, the voice admonished me in its grave accents, for those special moments of illumination within, or of visible delight from the world around you, which seem to set free the spirit for a moment. Not to discriminate these visitations of beauty, not thus to respond to them, is, the voice admonished me, on this short day of frost and sunshine, to sleep before evening.

Thus from not far off in space, but across a whole world, as it were, of thought, the voice of Walter Pater reached me, reached me perhaps alone among my companions. It was, however, only through his books that I knew him, for I never met this famous author, who was by no means famous in Oxford at this time, being disregarded there and held of no account. Edmund Gosse once told me that when the memorial to Shelley was installed in University College, and a great gathering of the famous writers and eminent intellectuals of the land were assembled to be present at the unveiling of this monument, he himself had gone to Oxford and had suggested that Walter Pater should give him luncheon. Pater entertained him with his usual grave amenity; and when luncheon was finished, and Gosse suggested that it was time to join the others who were to be present at the ceremony, Pater told him where to go, but said that he himself could not accompany him as he was not among those who had received an invitation to attend.

In Balliol, indeed, the name of Pater was known, but it was only mentioned with contempt. Pater had been an early pupil of Jowett’s; they had read Plato together; and I have always believed, though I have no proofs to give, that it was Jowett who had advised Pater to give up the writing of verse, to which he was greatly addicted, and try to become a writer of good prose. But when this effort resulted in the publication of Pater’s Renaissance, Jowett took alarm at once.

While all melts under our feet we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems, by a lifted horizon, to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange flowers, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend.

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

So Pater chanted from Brasenose in his magic rhythms, but his view of things was not acceptable in Balliol. To maintain an ecstasy, to burn with a hard gem-like flame, was by no means the Balliol conception of triumphant achievement. To beat New College in the Schools, to maintain a good place on the river, to win All Souls Fellowships and brilliant places in the Civil Service and high official honors, was more consonant with their ideal. No doubt this was the wiser view; no doubt the efficiency, wisdom, and justice which on the whole rule the counsels of the British Empire are in no inconsiderable part due to the moral, manly influence of Balliol.

It is not surprising, therefore, that not long before I went to Balliol the Master had felt himself called upon to mark, in an almost public manner, his disapprobation of Pater and all his ways, and it was only much later, when Pater published his wise and beautiful book on Plato and Platonism, that Jowett modified the harshness of his earlier judgment.

VIII

For the rest, I shared in that Oxford life which, in its setting of old colleges and gardens and little rivers, is surely the happiest and most enchanting life that is possible to young mortals. A taste of Paradise, a bit of the old golden world — so it seemed to me after my emancipation from that ogre’s den in America. I had not known that life could hold such happiness, such enchanting talks and friendships, such kindness and good-fellowship — and I drank to the full from the enchanted cup.

My literary ambitions, if they could be called ambitions, though not forgotten, were in abeyance for the time; my business was to get an education, and though I was acquainted with the budding authors who were at Oxford with me, — Lionel Johnson, Laurence Binyon, and Max Beerbohm, — I did not become intimate with any of them; I was contented with the society I found in my own college. This society was made up, for the most part, of young men who belonged to the Whig political families, the Russells, the Carlisle Howards, and the Peels, who were destined to careers in the world of politics. I too became engaged in political activities; I used to speak at village meetings and work for Liberal candidates at byelections; I joined the Oxford Charity Organization Committee; I organized meetings for temperance and social propaganda; and I think I was best known in Oxford as belonging to the not very estimable type of social reformer who combines extreme democratic views with no very pronounced dislike of the society of lords.

My political activities gave rise to at least one story which I should like to think still survives — I know that it did survive till very recently. During the election of 1892 a Balliol acquaintance of mine contested for Parliament and won the Woodstock division of Oxfordshire; and I, with several other enthusiastic Balliol Liberals, took lodgings in that rural district and canvassed and held meetings for our candidate. His opponent was an older Balliol man, — Lyttelton Gell, by name, — who had rooms in the college (in what capacity I don’t remember) and also a handsome residence on Headington Hill, above Oxford, where he dwelt in some state with his wife, a niece of George Brodrick, the Warden of Merton, and daughter of the Lord Midleton of the time. They were at home to Balliol men on Sundays, the first Sunday of the term being devoted, so the mocking Russells used to say, to members of the aristocracy, the second Sunday to the sons of gentlemen, and the third to Americans and Jews. On these third Sundays, I was sometimes a guest.

The Lyttelton Gells were friendly if somewhat pompous persons; the connection of Mrs. Cell with the peerage was, perhaps, somewhat overstressed in a place like Oxford, where such relationships are not frequent. Above all, her title of ‘Honorable,’ always a difficult title for the uninitiated to handle, — or rather to let alone, — presented certain possibilities of error into which I was supposed to have fallen. During the election it was related that I was seen in glimpses like the Scholar Gypsy wandering at the head of a band of Balliol radicals, bearing a banner with the strange device: —

Dining in Oxford not long ago, I heard this anecdote told by an elderly don who had no notion that I was the hero of it, and if this ghost of my undergraduate days still, like the Scholar Gypsy, survives, may I not boast non omnis moriar?

Should this story still run through Oxford halls, I shall owe to it, even without the aid of the grave Glanvill and the elegiac Matthew Arnold, a more enduring remembrance than any I might earn by a feat I had been long contemplating. I had reached Oxford by the untraveled route from Euston; my ambition all along had not been to win the rewards it offered — not to conquer Oxford, but to write a book about it.