conversed on a variety of subjects.' A tutor who took his pupils regularly or at least frequently for a walk to Headington, and who conversed with them on a variety of subjects, could not help having a deep influence on any receptive and imaginative young man ; and we may safely assume that the young Gibbon was much more influenced both by his tutor and by the serene and stimulating aspect of Magdalen than in his mature age he was willing to acknowledge. Another tutor whom Gibbon had in his last eight months at Magdalen did, it is true, neglect him; and this may perhaps be the reason why in his autobiography he says that it was his studies at Lausanne which were the foundation' of all his 'future improvements.' The 'five important years' which he spent in studies at Lausanne, had they been spent at Oxford, would have been (he says) 'steeped in port and prejudice.' Yet few people would deny that the trace of these two things appears clearly in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' so that the influence of the university shows itself after all.

·

His

The English men of letters of the period of the Romantic Movement were nearly all members of one or other university, and display strong evidences of this in their work. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Shelley, Byron, and Landor were all at Cambridge or Oxford. Of these only Wordsworth showed any particular devotion to his university. Perhaps the three external things which most impressed Wordsworth's poetic spirit were Cambridge, London, and the Lake District. poem on King's College Chapel, his sonnet on London from Westminster Bridge, show how the first two places aroused his genius. Charles Lamb, defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of academic institution,' loved to while away the brief weeks of his annual holiday in Oxford during the Long Vacation: 'I can play here the gentleman, enact the student.. Here I can take my walks unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree or standing I please.' His friend D., ' delightful anywhere,' was at his best in Oxford or Cambridge. The Cam and Isis are to him "better than all the waters of Damascus." On the Muse's hill he is happy and good, as one of the Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains; and when he goes about with you to show you the halls and colleges,

you think you have with you the Interpreter at the yir House Beautiful.'

Shelley was an Oxford man; but whether the restraints and precisions and academic niceties of the university had any other effect than to goad him into rebellion and recklessness, none can say. Hogg describes him as an undergraduate bursting into his (Hogg's) rooms at teatime, chafing his hands before the fire, declaiming against the 'dull and languid' lecture that he had been listening to, and swearing that he would never go to another.

'I went away, indeed, before the lecture was finished. I stole away, for it was so stupid, and I was so cold that my teeth chattered. The Professor saw me, and appeared to be displeased. I thought I could have got out without being observed, but I struck my knee against a bench and made a noise, and he looked at me. I am determined that he shall never see me again.

""What did he talk about?"

""About stones! about stones," he answered with a downcast look and in a melancholy tone, as if about to say something excessively profound. "About stones! stones, stones, stones!-nothing but stones!—and so drily. It was wonderfully tiresome, and stones are not interesting things in themselves.'

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Shelley had taken up the subject of geology, for which study he was quite unsuited, and then rebelled because he found the lectures tiresome. When Shelley was ultimately sent down by the Master and Fellows of University College for writing and printing an irreligious pamphlet, his sensitive nature took the blow in a way that made him rebellious against authority for life. His friend Hogg (who went down with him on the same stage coach) writes: "The scene was changed from the quiet seclusion of academic groves and gardens, and the calm valley of our silvery Isis, to the stormy ocean of that vast and shoreless world, to the utmost violence of which he was, at an early age, suddenly and unnaturally abandoned.' This generous and lovable man was estranged for ever from his mother university, against which, however, he spoke no word and cherished no rancour: he was simply silent.

Approaching more modern times, men of letters seem

almost to fall into two schools according as they have been at the university or not. There is no antagonism between the two schools; neither can claim the preeminence. They are simply different from each other, each school contributing to the beautiful and lasting things of mankind in its own way. Tennyson was a member of Trinity College, Cambridge. His poetry is smooth and regular in form, imbued with the classical spirit, dwelling lovingly on the quiet landscapes such as he knew in East Anglia. Browning, his great contemporary, was not a university man-just a grand, robust Englishman, with a wealth of imagination, a genius for expression, unequalled in his own Thackeray was a Cambridge man; Pendennis' has good scenes of university life. Dickens, whose work is perhaps cast in a rather rougher mould, learned his craftsmanship in the hard school of life of the outside world. Ruskin, one of the great prophets of the Victorian Age, was at Christ Church as an undergraduate, and later was Professor of Art in the University of Oxford. Carlyle, a more bitter, even more dogmatic, perhaps more trenchant critic, was trained at a Scottish university: his style is certainly less academic' than Ruskin's.

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Swinburne is, like Shelley, an exception to the rule that the university impresses itself deeply on a young man's mind. He looked back upon his years at Oxford with distaste, and, in point of fact, he appears to have derived almost nothing from it. Sir Edmund Gosse in his 'Life of Swinburne' writes:

'It was much to be observed that in later life, though he spoke often and in affectionate terms of Eton, Swinburne was never betrayed into the smallest commendation of Oxford. He was, indeed, unwilling to mention the university, and if obliged to do so, it was with a gesture of impatience and a reference to "the foggy damp of Oxonian atmosphere." Long afterwards, in late middle life, he railed against Matthew Arnold for his "effusive Oxonolatry," and earlier he had contrived to analyse and commend "The Scholar-Gipsy," and "Thyrsis," without so much as naming the "sweet city with her dreaming spires," which is the very substance of those poems. He used to express the view that an Oxford resident never dies, having never lived, but ceases. Much misapprehension, much exasperation, must have gone

to build up Swinburne's dislike of Oxford, for he yielded as little as Dryden did to " the gross flattery of universities,” and the more he knew of Oxford the more he seemed to hate it.'

Balliol was not at its best, although it was a fine college, in 1857 when Swinburne was an undergraduate. Later he learned to value highly the society of Jowett when that remarkable man was Master of the college: but this, apparently, was not until after 1870. In a letter to Frederick Locker, dated Aug. 4, 1871, he writes: 'I think of going to Scotland in a week on my promised visit to the Master of Balliol-(who would have told me so 10 years ago, when I was rusticated and all but expelled?) . . ." He went, spending about three weeks in the Highlands, enjoying the air, the hill-climbing, the swimming, and the society of Jowett and Browning. He also visited Jowett at Balliol and met Taine and Matthew Arnold among the guests. But he refused to accept an honorary degree from Oxford. Indeed, so far as academic inspiration affected him, it was to Eton that he made acknowledgments. In his

'Eton, an Ode,' he seems to imply as much, by saying that Shelley's inspiration came from the noble foundation of King Henry VI :

'Shelley, lyric lord of England's lordliest singers, here first heard

Ring from lips of poets crowned and dead the Promethean word

Whence his soul took fire, and power to outsoar the sunward-soaring bird.'

In some respects the influence of Eton upon the mind and spirit of young poets who have been there must be considered to have been as great as that of Oxford. In addition to Swinburne's acknowledged debt, there is Gray's as set forth in his ode, 'On a Distant Prospect of Eton College,' and Robert Bridges, whose 'Ode to Eton' is perhaps the most perfect of its kind and the deepest in feeling. One of the most beloved of the Eton tutors, William Johnson (Cory), whose volume of poems, 'Ionica,' is admired by Etonians and by scholars in general, was a highly characteristic product both of the public school and university. It is almost impossible to conceive of Johnson writing his poems without his

academic gown; and many generations of Etonians received their scholarly inspiration from him.

It is in Matthew Arnold perhaps that the academic associations are most clearly apparent. His whole life and teaching were founded on his studies at the university. His eclecticism, his careful, correct, gentlemanly style, his wide knowledge of the classics, ancient and modern, his respect for the received canons of taste which have stood the test of time, his courtliness and proud modesty, are the quintessence of Oxford and Cambridge life. His love for the university was passionate, and his finest piece of prose is a defence of Oxford.

'Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!

"There are our young barbarians all at play." And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection-to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?'

In his essay on 'The Literary Influence of Academies,' Matthew Arnold points out that the lack of such centres of correct information, judgment, taste, tends to make a literature provincial. In England,' he writes, there needs a miracle of genius like Shakespeare's to produce balance of mind, and a miracle of intellectual delicacy like Dr Newman's to produce urbanity of style.' Well, Newman was a finished product of the universityscholar and fellow. His urbane style, like Matthew Arnold's, owed much more to the university than the délicatesse of the French writers owed to their Academy. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the Academy of England, only they have not had the cramping effect which an academy may have, because there were, and are, many other avenues to literary distinction. The two universities did not dominate English letters, but they areand this makes them unique among all other universities -imperishably associated with the literature of their country.

The leisure and resources of university life-the