ahead of abler men. The cheering of the undergraduates, however, went some distance towards equalizing things. The men who The men who received the warmest applause were Liddon, the famous preacher, and Arnold, the poet. When it came to the latter gentleman's turn, all young Oxford in the galleries went wild. They made a prodigious cheering; the young men's enthusiasm was enough to stir some generous blood in the most sluggish veins. Of course, Mr. Arnold's comparative youthfulness had much to do with it, and his recent attacks upon the dissenters had endeared him to the clergymen's sons in the galleries. The Chancellor, who had been throwing about his issimes profusely among a lot of people of whom nobody had ever heard, contented himself with calling Mr. Arnold vir ornatissime, or some other opprobrious epithet -which, as one of Mr. Arnold's many admirers, I felt called upon to resent. understood afterwards, however, that Lord Salisbury had considered the propriety of addressing him as O lucidissime et dulcissime (most light and most sweet), which, I suppose, would scarcely have done. He did joke, though, in one case; he addressed the editor of the "Edinburgh Review as vir doctissime, in republica litterarum potentissime, and at that everybody was amused. The incident gives one a high idea of the power which inheres in reserve, dignity and position. A cabinet minister by congratulating an editor upon his formidableness in the republic of letters, creates more merriment than could a harlequin by throwing his body into twenty contortions.

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The bad behavior of the undergraduates in the gallery on these occasions is famous. I was present at two commemorations, and can testify to the power of lung and the great good humor, and animal spirits of the British youth. At the last commemoration they kept up an incessant howl from the beginning to the end. I cannot say much for the wit, though, I believe, they do sometimes hit upon something worth recording. It is said that when Tennyson presented himself in his usually uncombed condition some undergraduate asked him, "Did your mother call you early, Mr. Tennyson?" When Longfellow was made D. C. L., another proposed, "Three cheers for red man of the West," which, I am told, Mr. Longfellow thought very good. But, of course, wit and originality are just as rare among yelling boys as in synods and

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parliaments. The scant wit is supplemented by the more widely diffused qualities of impudence and vocal volume. When the Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Liddell, of Liddell & Scott's Dictionary (the accent of his name, by the way, is not upon the last syllable), was reading a Latin address, some one would call out, "Now construe.' A man who violated the canons of dress by appearing in a white coat was fairly stormed out of the place. He stood it for an hour or so, during which he was addressed: "Take off that coat, sir." "Go out, sir." "Won't you go at once?" "Ladies, request him to leave." "Doctor Brown, won't you put that man out?" (Then, in a conversational and moderate tone), “Just put your hand upon his shoulder and lead him out." After an hour of it the man withdrew. Each successive group of ladies was cheered as it came in. The young men would exclaim: "Three cheers for the ladies in blue." "Three cheers for the ladies in white, brown, red, gray, etc." The poor fellows who read the prize odes and essays were dreadfully bullied. One young man recited an English poem, of which I could not catch the burden, but from the manner of its delivery I should say that it must have been upon the saddest subject that ever engaged the muse of mortal. His physiognomy and his tone of voice alike expressed the dismal and the disconsolate. I think that possibly the extreme sadness of his manner may have been induced by the reception rather than the matter of his poem. They cat-called, hooted him, and laughed immeasurably at him. One young gentleman with an eyeglass leaned over the gallery, and in a colloquial tone inquired, " My friend, is that the refrain that hastened the decease of the old cow?" In the intervals of the horrible hootings, I could only now and then catch a word like "breeze" or "trees." By and by the galleries caught the swing of the poet's measure, and kept time to his cadencies with their feet, and with a rhythmical roar of their voices. It was too painful to laugh at. One felt so for the poor fellow, and more still for his mother and sisters, who, I am sure, were there. I was par ticularly glad to notice among the men who last year were compelled to face the music, a man who the year before had been especially energetic in the galleries.

To see an English university one should look at it from the don's side rather than the undergraduates. Undergraduates are of

exceedingly little importance. The dons are the essentials of university life; the students are its transient and unimportant incidents. At Yale, when we were juniors, we thought ourselves of consequence. We considered a senior greater than a professor, and the tutors we pretended to hold in no esteem at all. The purpose of the founders of the University of Oxford, as one dispirited and conservative old gentleman told me, was originally not study alone, but study and devotion. The colleges were associations of men who gave their lives to learning and religion. The education of youth was rather an afterthought and an incident. Whether or not the present state of things at Oxford and Cambridge is the result of tradition, it is certainly true that the fellows and masters of the colleges constitute the universities. At Cambridge I had letters to two of the fellows of Trinity; and at Oxford I was the guest for a week of a friend who was a fellow of Oriel. The spirit and social atmosphere of the two universities seemed to me very much the same; almost any statement which might be true of the society of either would be true of the other.

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A Fellow, as everybody knows, passes a good examination, and for the rest of his life or until marriage draws from the university an income of from $1000 to $2000. For this he is under no obligation to return any labor. Those who reside at the universities are usually tutors or lecturers, and for these services of course receive extra pay. On marriage they are compelled to resign their fellowships. The men who wish to marry, obtain if they can, livings in the Church, school-inspectorships or appointments under governments. cently the universities have been pressing the abolition of the restriction upon marriage and expecting it from every successive parliament. It is both pleasant and painful, to think of the number of interesting young couples who at this moment are waiting for a word from Mr. Disraeli. A very pretty tale one might make of it. The story of another Evangeline, waiting through long years upon the slow steps of legislation and rising each morning to scan with eager eyes the parliamentary proceedings, might form a good subject for a play or a poem. I examined very few of the considerations in favor of the reform. This one presents itself, however; men are always strangely tempted to what

is forbidden them; celibacy may not be so irksome, if they know they may marry when they choose. Upon the other side I heard a bachelor urge that the university would cease to be such an equal, reasonable, sensible place as it has been heretofore. The women would introduce discord. The wife of a head master would no doubt think herself above a poor tutor's and would give herself airs.

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Were it not for the peculiar and easily explained susceptibility of college tutors, the circumstances of their bachelor life so delightful that one might wonder that even matrimony can tempt them away from it. The physical life is looked. after very well. The dinners are fair and the lodgings comfortable. The bachelor can do there what is difficult to do elsewhere he can live well and dine in pleasant company. He is not solitary as at a club, and the company of congenial men who have the same interests with himself makes the commons dinner infinitely better than any table d'hôte. The dons' rooms are of all degrees of comfort and elegance. Some of them are very bare; others are pretty and well-furnished. The rooms of men who have been some time at the university and who have a taste for elegance grow to be pretty; and a pleasantly arranged room, I believe, must always be the result of time. At Merton College, Oxford, I saw an apartment of which the whole front had been made into a bow-window, facing upon a green and humid quadrangle. Its occupant, I remember, showed me among his curiosities a side-board of the 17th century, on which was carved in very bold relief a good part of the events of Genesis. There was a figure of the Lord, about as long as your finger, walking in the garden; and Adam and Eve and the Serpent were engaged in conversation about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam, strange to say, was accompanied by a dog of some choice breed which smelt about his heels in a rather clumsy wooden manner, but very much as fallen canine nature is yet in the habit of doing. Such elegance and curiousness are unusual, I suppose, though many of the rooms are cozy and inviting. The ceilings are low, and low ceilings are warm and pleasant. One is delighted with the sense of the ancient atmosphere, the ample grate, the books upon the shelves and strewn about the tables.

At Cambridge I left my cards and letters, and in walking about the town missed seeing J, of Trinity, who had called in my absence, but I chanced to meet the Dean of one of the smaller colleges, whom I had known in London, and I accepted his invitation to his college. I went with him the pretty walk behind the colleges, and, reaching his room, found there several of the tutors who had strolled in, and were sitting in the dusk before the grate, waiting for dinner. The dining-hall of the college was small and dimly lighted. There were but three or four of the Fellows present, and we sat together upon a raised platform. An undergraduate read a long grace in Latin. I sat with my back to the wall so that I could look over the Fellows down upon the tables, dim and candle-lit, where the young men dined. The fewness of the undergraduates, and the quiet and dark of the hall gave one a feeling something like that which children have when huddled under a big umbrella. Sitting in talk with these intelligent, unaffected scholars, and having one's heart warmed by their genial converse and kind attention, and with one's only distraction to peep into the dim and quiet ends of the room, how blessed seemed these men's occupations; how pleasant the tenor of their lives; how attractive appeared the comfort, the poetry and solid happiness there is in learning! The hall at Trinity is, I believe, the great place to see. "If they ask you to dine there, mind you go," I was told. But who does not know the pleasure of finding beauties and curiosities of which the almanacs say nothing! I liked to think that the earth contained so happy a spot as this dim hall of Jesus College, unpraised of men and unheralded by the guide-books. I was more diverted with the old side-board at Merton than with the Tower of London.

The next morning the Dean and myself accepted an invitation to breakfast from J-, of Trinity, whom I had heard was one of the cleverest men in Cambridge. We climbed up one of those dark, narrow, perpendicular winding staircases, and knocked upon his door, and our host came out to meet us. He introduced me to two or three others whom he had invited. It was raining, I remember, and the windows of his room looked down upon a dripping garden (garden is the name given to a lawn planted with trees), and a little arched bridge which crossed a stream like a millrace. The drops fell rapidly against the

window-panes, and it was dark and warm in the large low old room where we breakfasted. My host's conversation was light and witty, and the talk of the table ran much to politics, and that pleasantest and most instructive kind of discourse, gossip. A good deal was said of education, which is one of the most pressing political questions for Great Britain. One gentleman, who was a school inspector, had been driving about England, looking at the private schools everywhere along his route, and examining the teachers and scholars. With the exception of the examination, it struck me that this must be a very pleasant occupation.

There were present at this breakfast several men who, I was told, were very clever, and again, as elsewhere in Cambridge and Oxford, was I struck with a quality of theirs, which if I praise they may laugh at me-I mean their modesty. Some of them were even diffident. It was a pleasure to look at these men, and think, 'you know ever so much about international law, and you about the Greek philosophy, and nobody knows what you can tell us about the particles." My host was a lecturer upon Plato, I believe. We sat together for an hour after breakfast, and I fell to admiring audibly his circumstances and employment. Our conversation was upon topics not usually touched upon by men on the first day of an acquaintance. One of the drawbacks of travel is that natural delicacy which forbids men who are strangers from speaking upon any but trivial subjects. The necessity is sometimes rather hard upon travelers, who are always strangers. But I remember the Trinity lecturer making such a remark as this, that no course of philosophical reading ever gave satisfactory opinions to anybody but a poverty-stricken theorist. I replied that though I had not the least doubt he was right, it was, nevertheless, very good to have tested for oneself the vanity of such a way of getting at the truth. But it is not to be expected that they would appreciate their advantages; scarcely anybody does. My host walked with me about the colleges and promised, if I stayed, that I should see an old gentleman who had been Lord Byron's tutor when that young nobleman was an undergraduate at Trinity.

At Oxford I was for a week the guest of a friend who was a Fellow of Oriel. An Oriel Fellowship has always been, I am told, the undergraduate's blue-ribbon, and

I presume that the men I met there were very excellent specimens of Oxford. The undergraduates had left the university, and the Fellows of Oriel dined, not in hall, but in the wine-room. A curious feature of the meal, the grace, has been, I believe, incorrectly given by visitors. Before dinner they say "Benedictus benedicat," and after dinner, i.e., just before dessert, somebody drops his head in the middle of the talk and says "Benedicto benedicatur." The room is hung round with pictures of the ancient and recent worthies of the college. A fine and large likeness of Clough looked down upon the warm and pleasant scene. This sort of living, compared with the only bachelor modes of existence I had ever experienced, a club, a boarding-house, or a hotel, seemed perfection. And if the old wainscoted room, and the company of the genial scholars was so pleasing, what did I think one evening when dining at Merton College, famed for the beauty of its gardens, coffee was served in a rustic seat on the lawn, and, as the summer evening came down upon the grass and the still trees, and a star or two came out and brightened, and the towers over us and about us grew grayer and darker, we sat and conversed, and listened far into the twilight.

One

In a week's stay about Oxford I saw it in many forms and moods. An Oxford quadrangle is the hoariest and most ancient spectacle in my experience. Shut up in one of them at the time of sun-down the impression is particularly strong. feels the planet to have aged. I found it difficult to conceive that a scene yet strong with the strength of Nature remained anywhere in the world. It was hard to think that beyond the swelling and sinking Atlantic the blue line of the Allegany trembled over the quiet harvests of a familiar valley, or that the stream of the yellow Missouri drowned with disconsolate floods his black slimy islands of sand.

Some of the quadrangles were very gray and somber; others were warm and happy. In the cloisters of Magdalen they have found the flower which best harmonizes with the associations of the place. It is the wild rose. Upon a mid-summer afternoon when Oxford is deserted, when no feet but your own are heard in the cloisters, when the blue air of the quadrangle is warmed to the fill by the sun, there is that in the odor of the flower of wild, yet sweet, of gay, yet yearning, which harmo

nizes well with the spongy turf, with the moist air thrilled by the sunshine, with the cold recesses of the cloister and the benign silence with which the scene regards your footfall.

The character for learning of the men I met at the universities stands, I suppose, as high as that of the same class of men anywhere in the world. It is a pleasure to me to dwell upon their candor and kindness. I discovered scarcely anything to find fault with. "We grow a very disagreeable specimen of prig here, said one. I did not see him. Here and there I met a man whose playfulness had a somewhat learned flavor and whose speeches might, when repeated, have had a sound of pedantry, but the awkwardness was accompanied by a simplicity which made it rather attractive. I must say, though, that the wit was a little wordy-but that is true of the wit of young college tutors everywhere; their jokes may be said to have extension, their jests and quips remind one of the gambols of a Newfoundland pup. The older men, where they were not more solemn, had rather more pith and point. But the wit of scholars is apt to be diluted, just as is that of the man of fashion, though from a different cause. The wit of the man of fashion shares the general feebleness of his nature; that of the scholar is poor because he does not see enough of life; because the situations in which he is an actor or a looker on are not sufficiently numerous. various and rapidly successive.

What especially strikes the visitor at the 'universities, is their way of speaking the unadulterated truth; it does not occur to them that anything else should be spoken. They have their pretenders and humbugs in England just as here, men who live and thrive by the inevitable folly and inattention of the mass of the community. Some poor offspring of a lucky talent and a lucky opportunity wins applause and place and profit with scarcely a struggle. Some light creature gets the start of this tremendous world and is swept onward like a leaf. Oxford and Cambridge are the places to hear these men called by their right names. is just as well that most people do not indulge in such plain speaking, for most people would be apt to be mistaken. at the universities there are many thinking, educated men, whose opinions are tolerably apt to be correct. They are very little troubled with that charity which will

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But

say no ill of your neighbor because the report of it may come to your neighbor's ear. They have no axes to grind, no ulterior aims, no policies. One evening at Oxford a well known name was mentioned, and the whole company at once agreed that he was an ass. That was my own opinion, but had I mentioned it among people more polite and circumspect, I should have been thought, if not a jealous and deprecatory person, at least a very rash one-or, perhaps, one of those envious detractors who go about tearing the reputations of the great and good. The

man was certainly dull and talkative, yet he deserved respect of a kind. There was an acerbity, however, in the comment which his folly did not quite explain. Why should they so go out of the way to abuse a comparatively unimportant man for merely being an ass? This point was naïvely met by one ingenious young accuser, who said, After all, the only thing I have against him is that he's a successful man." To one exceedingly vivacious, agreeable and original old gentleman who had been an inmate of Oxford pretty much since his nursery days, I mentioned a much praised book, and asked his opinion of it. It was in some department of political science upon which I should not have ventured to express an opinion. He said promptly that there was a great deal more talk than thought in it. Why," I asked, the best reviewers call it a triumph for England, and the critics give you the impression that the writer has a deal more of modest merit than reputation." "That is just what I say," he replied, "the success

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of the work has been made by the press; the book is a fair one, and the author is a competent man, but it is wordy and in no way remarkable."

English writers upon this country have given us the impression that their scholars are less men of the world than our own. I found the young men at Oxford and Cambridge very greatly interested in matters outside their universities. Many of them, I thought, were piqued by the social power which the aristocracy still retains in England, for no men are better placed than themselves to see how belated is the entire face of their society. Not a few of them have aspirations for political careers. Many of them are barristers and have chambers in London, some few conducting cases, but most of them waiting for them. For men who are only students and citizens of the world, the greatest city in Europe is but two hours away. It is they who get most out of university life. They may infest, if they choose, those old quadrangles of Oxford for a lifetime; the ends of Europe are within two days of them. The physical man and the eating, drinking and sleeping man are well enough cared for. They have the great libraries, and the constant society of cultivated men in such numbers that they may look about among themselves for suitable acquaintance. They have for a home one of the most beautiful places in the world. There is scarcely a happy circumstance of a scholar's life which for tune and the generous wisdom of the men who have been through centuries the custodians of the university have denied them.

IN the letter of cordial thanks that came presently to Emilia from the unknown, this time with the postmark of the distant city, an address was given to which she might send a reply. There was a little fire on her hearth, for the mornings and nights were now cool among the hills; Emilia laid the note with its two forerunners on the coals, and watched them shrivel and blaze ere she wrote the reply whose idea she at first had flouted.

They were

"I have burned your letters. most kind-too kind for me. I do not know how you found me out. I do not know what makes me trust you so-per haps my need. But I must try to do my duty alone.

She mailed the letter herself, walking to the village post-office. The woods through which she went on the side of the Cliff were in the perfect ripeness of their green growth; sometimes a red branch holding