Art. 11.-MODERN OXFORD.

A History of the University of Oxford. Vol. III. Modern Oxford. By Sir Charles Edward Mallet. Methuen, 1927.

WE have seldom met with a book so tightly packed with information of the most miscellaneous sort as is Sir Charles Mallet's new volume on the history of the University of Oxford, and we are bound to say, in his praise, that the tight packing has not made the book dry to read. Most of the pages are full of interest, if some are a little 'parochial' in their detail of the minutiæ of individual College history, only likely to gratify readers from the particular college in question. For, as in his two volumes on Medieval and Renaissance Oxford, Sir Charles has undertaken to give us the annals not of the University alone, but of all its component units, down to the now defunct halls, which struggled on till the end of the 19th century. This method of treatment necessitates certain breaches of continuity in the general narrative, where condensed college history crops up at the end of a chapter on social, political, or scholastic developments. Nevertheless, as we have already observed, the interest seldom flags— many college anecdotes are extremely diverting, and illustrate well enough the spirit of the times. It would be difficult to realise without their aid some of the odd possibilities of life in Oxford in the 18th, or even the early 19th, century.

There are, of course, two sharp breaks, one between the story of the first half-century-that of the Jacobite University of Hearne and Dr King,—with all its quarrels and scandals ;-and that of the generation of somnolence tempered by lively abuses which followed. The second comes between the annals of the later 18th century and those of the bitter controversies of the 19th, concerning the Oxford Movement and the work of the two great Royal Commissions. The period from 1700 to 1830 can be treated with judicial impartiality by any historian, whatever his political views. But when once we come to the Tractarians and the work of the University Com

missions, we arrive at problems on which controversy is still alive, and the commentator has to choose his side, and thereby display his bias. We gather that Sir Charles Mallet as might be expected from one who was a scholar of Balliol and a pupil of Dr Jowett-must be reckoned an Academic Liberal of the moderate sort; but he possesses such a kindly and genial temper that his controversial knocks are never vicious, and condemnation, when it comes, is rather humorous than heavy. The one personage who provokes him to real indignation, and receives a castigation with which most readers will sympathise, is Mr Butterfield, the architect favoured by High Churchmen in Victorian days, selected to disfigure Oxford 'chiefly out of sympathy, as it seems, with his ecclesiastical views.' He 'vented the passion for variety in buildings which no one has yet found the courage to destroy-though Mr Morrison offered Balliol 20,000l. to demolish Butterfield's Chapel, 'a structure deplorably illsuited to the surroundings in which it was placed.' As to his more pretentious work at Keble Chapel, Sir Charles finds it 'strangely wanting in judgment, dignity, and repose, its crude colouring distressed spectators,' and in general this architect committed with impunity outrages as bad as those which Holdsworth and other 18th-century vandals had projected on paper, but were never allowed to carry out.

Sir Charles is evidently somewhat of an optimist, and in his survey of Oxford since the first Royal Commission of 1852, finds that all has gone well in the best of all possible worlds. That the University needed drastic reform, no one will now deny; that the changes have all been well executed is a more doubtful proposition, whether the critic is a federalist,' i.e. a believer in the University composed of colleges as Switzerland is composed of cantons, with a small and weak central executive, or, on the other hand, a 'Unitarian,' i.e. one who conceives of the University as a corporation managing its teaching and administration for itself, and regarding colleges as little more than boarding houses for its students. The extremists of both parties still remain discontented with the working of the three Royal Commissions. But this, as Sir Charles would no doubt remark, is no proof that the Commissions have erred-compromise is the soul

of English politics. The Federalist murmurs against University Boards which strip colleges of fellowships and endowments, and waste the money got thereby on professors who have no pupils, and Honour Schools where the class-lists are well-nigh empty categories, and on sumptuous buildings whose occupants are few. The Unitarian, no less, can tell of colleges which cheat the academic Common Fund by extravagant building and unnecessary superabundance of staff, while their tutors boycott the professorial class-rooms, which the University provides but has no power to fill with students. We may still hear echoes of the tirades of Mark Pattison and Thorold Rogers on the one side, and Goldwin Smith and his friends on the other. But, after all, the machine is working pretty well: the ideals both of the Federalist and of the Unitarian may be unfulfilled-but neither of them can deny that Oxford is in a much more satisfactory state than it was before Royal Commissions began to meddle with its ancient autonomy, and—as we fear that we must add-with its ancient abuses.

It requires a strong effort of imagination for the graduate of to-day to realise what the 18th-century University was like. He can recover its unamiable characteristics by diligent search in the pages of the first section of Sir Charles Mallet's volume. The true governing body, the Hebdomadal Board, was composed of an oligarchy of Heads of Houses: in times of unrest the Hebdomadal maintained an intermittent warfare with Congregation, which, though it had no administrative power, could turn down all legislation proposed to it by the Board. But no amount of rejected decrees or statutes could impair the position of the irresponsible and irremovable Hebdomadal. Internally most of the colleges were from time to time rent by long and bitter feuds between two factions of fellows, or between the fellows as a body and their Principal, Warden, or Provost. These led to constant disputed elections, and interminable appeals to the visitor-a bishop or chancellor whose decisions were sometimes haphazard or confused. find the Head of the College vetoing every election to a fellowship for years on end, and his fellows retaliating by ingenious methods of so manipulating the college income that their tyrant should suffer in purse or dignity.

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Many heads were pluralists on a large scale, holding not only country livings by twos and threes, but distant deaneries, and even bishoprics, which took them away from their college duties. Elections to fellowships, and equally to scholarships, might often go to the deserving student or schoolboy, but as often were given away by pure nepotism. The worst abuse was the institution of 'Founders' Kin,' which led not only to the preference for family descent over intellectual ability, but even to the scandal of 'faked' pedigrees. Where Founders' Kin abuses did not exist, there was often an almost equally pernicious system of county or diocesan restrictionsscholarships or fellowships were confined to candidates born in, e.g. the diocese of Worcester or the county of Northampton. The number of localised foundations was so great that a promising boy, born in some shire which had no endowments attached to it, might have some trouble in discovering where an 'open' scholarship was available. Of 542 fellowships at Oxford only twenty-two were really 'open,' uncontrolled by conditions of locality or kin or the obligation to take Holy Orders (p. 315).

The social life of the University was disfigured by contrasts of undergraduate status which seem to us incredible. The gentleman-commoner, practically released from all bonds of discipline, feasted with the fellows at the high table in Hall, where he was an intolerable nuisance. For the conversation of tutors and deans had to be restricted in his presence, while the conversation of gentlemen-commoners could not be free when an audience of seniors sat around them. No worse arrangement was ever made. This privileged class, with its intentional or unintentional arrogance, was hateful to the charity-scholar, the servitor, who in return for such education as he could pick up, and a bachelor's degree in the future, discharged most of the duties of the College Scout of to-day.

Eighteenth-century satirists draw highly-coloured pictures of the miseries of these poor lads, who 'attended to the needs of gentlemen-commoners, cleaned their shoes and wrote their exercises, while dressing in their old clothes and dining often off cold scraps.' As Sir Charles Mallet writes, 'It was the grinding poverty contrasted with wealth, the grinding poverty which

sometimes went hand in hand with great natural endowments, which embittered some servitors, as it embittered Samuel Johnson in his undergraduate days.' The great Doctor wrote that the difference, Sir, between us Servitors and Gentlemen-Commoners is this, that we are men of Wit and no Fortune, while they are men of Fortune and no Wit.'

According to the biographer of the poet Shenstone a gentleman-commoner could not be seen in public with a servitor without disparaging himself. It is astonishing that all servitors did not develop into whatever was the equivalent of Bolsheviks in the 18th century. Yet some of them became in time not only respectable country parsons, but Heads of Colleges, canons and prebendaries, distinguished men of letters (such as William Gifford, the first Editor of the 'Quarterly '), well-paid public servants; one astonishing case, John Potter, a servitor of Queen's College, rose to be Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of all England.

Looking at the general condition of the University in the 18th century, with its professors without audiences, its colleges full of fellows without any regular duties, who had taken orders on compulsion, and were waiting year after year for a college living of competent endowment, to enable them to marry and depart; remembering that the medieval examination system had become a farce, and the modern examination system had not yet been invented, we sometimes ask ourselves how Oxford continued to be called a place of learning or of education.

The answer must be that individuals are sometimes better than their surroundings. Thus among the forty celibate fellows of Magdalen, St John's, or New College, there would always be some few who were not mere expectants of a college living, but students by real choice. The test by examination, it is true, had become a shameless formula, the repetition of set questions and answers before the regent master' whom the undergraduates had chosen, by the candidates who fee'd himand fed him too! For it was the custom for the successful student to give his examiner a sumptuous meal at the end of the farcical proceedings. But education may proceed without the necessity for examinations,

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