gian book, in rude and radiant health, which, if I had not been assured of his habits, I should have averred could have resulted only from portwine and plenty of exercise. Why, sir, his face under his white hair looked like a peony capped with snow, if snows and peonies ever may be supposed to come together. No, the case is getting desperate. Hea ven knows, it is not the death but the living of these good men that I long for. They are said to have an excellent custom at the sister University, which we should do well to imitate. At certain periods of the year they have up their Incumbents from the country, and ply them liberally with whist and wine.

After these anniversaries, the good cheer, united with want of exercise, inducing apoplectic seizures, generally operates in creating vacancies. But seriously speaking, I think Government ought to pension off these officers of the church militant, in whose feeble hands the bestordered parishes become overgrown with moral and religious weeds.

CELSUS. The duties of Government appear nowadays to be understood in a very limited degree. The country has suffered for years past from chronic misgovernment. A man must be an idiot who expects good government from a coterie of Whigs, as long as they beget Whiglings, and have offices to put them in. When have the Whigs ever fathered one wholesome measure, or made one disinterested appointment? Whom did they delight to honour? Not the brave, not the good, not the honest, not the hard-working. Feather-bed soldiers, fat millionaires, aristocratic roués, courtiers and chamberlains, well-connected clergymen of mild manners and LowChurch principles, all milk and innocent stupidity, side by side with clever men about town who play their cards well, literally and metaphorically-such are their especial favourites. And yet they allowed their police to prosecute low cardsharpers in railway-carriages, and affect moral

horror at the state of the public streets. Moral and religious hypocrisy was the last phase of degradation to which these men arrived. And because they called themselves the friends of the people, the people were fools enough to give them unlimited tenure of office, little suspecting how atrociously they were betrayed and insulted in every one of their public acts. At last their hour came. But I fear it came too late. To repair the mischief their predecessors have done will tax the utmost energies of Lord Derby's government. It has to restore a belief in the justice and impartiality of administration at home, as well as to 'retrieve our national character abroad, which despots and democrats alike have learned to treat with contempt, in consequence of the atrocious double-dealing of Lord Palmerston and his satellites. Truly the British people is the most long-suffering in the world. I have no patience with any one who names the name of Government when the Whigs are in office. They never did, and never will, govern the country. They only treat it as a huge game-preserve for the sustenance and recreation of their idle selves and idler hangers-on.

CELEBS.-But what is the reason that our honoured Lord and Chancellor, as he is called in the BiddingPrayer, cannot form a Government that will stand, because it cannot command a Parliamentary majority?

CELSUS.-Assuming this to be true, it is for the simple reason that he is too honest a man for the times— wishes to have honest supporters-and, not possessing the lantern of Diogenes, cannot find a sufficiency of them. But I deny that we are fallen so low. There is still honesty enough in the independent members of the House to cause them to rally to the side of a thoroughly honest Government; and in case of their failing him, Lord Derby may appeal to the country with a fair hope of his intentions not being misunderstood. His Government was the only solution of the difficulty in which the collapse of the Whigs placed her Majesty. The Tories, whatever their faults be as a party, never lie; they say to the country that they are essentially a

monarchical and aristocratical party, and democratical only so far as it is conducive to the interests of all that the people should have a voice in public affairs. The Whigs call the old dotard Demos their lord and master, and meanwhile rule his second childhood with a rod of iron,making a great fuss about educating him, that they may teach him to sign his name, and make a will in their favour. As the demagogues befooled Demos in Aristophanes by imitating and encouraging his foibles and fantasies, so did Palmerston befool John Bull by professing to be in his own person the incarnation of the national character, making it, in the mean time, supremely ridiculous in the eyes of surrounding nations. Here in Oxford, as we say again in the Bidding-Prayer, they have played their old game. They have cajoled the people with the name of University Reform, yet their Royal Commission has left the rankest social evil, the Celibacy of College Fellows, undisturbed.

What the country wants is not political reform, which serves, under Whig regime, as a perpetual seton of discontent. We have had too much of it. It all results in oligarchical centralisation, and nothing else. We want social reform. We want the people made better and happier. We want our towns well drained and well supplied with water. We want good sensible schools, not to teach the ologies," but duty to God and man and common things. We want the poor improved, not by teaching them sedition and infidelity, but by teaching them, in respecting their betters, to respect themselves. We want, above all, an increase of innocent leisure and innocent pleasure for our overdriven labourers, and the tie which binds the rich to the poor strengthened by a wholesome feeling of dependence, not slackened by a miserable theory of independence and equality.

CELEBS.-Agreeing with you that we want a great many things which we cannot have, I am not quite prepared, in spite of all my personal complaints, to hold that it would be well to allow College Fellows to marry. It would clog the succession. Fellowships would only be deter

mined by death or succession to a living. There would be so few literary prizes for aspiring young men.

CELSUS.-I am glad that you have brought forward the most cogent of all the popular arguments on that subject first, as I hope that I can answer it to your satisfaction.

I scarcely think that clogging the succession, even if the danger were admitted to be founded on fact, would be so great an evil. Under present circumstances, the extent to which it would take place would not be very appreciable. The necessity being removed of taking holy orders, which by statute applied to the whole of the Fellows of certain Colleges, a part of the Fellowships would become vacant on accepting church preferments. The Clerical Fellows would marry on their Fellowships joined with College Tutorships in the case of the resident, with curacies in the case of the nonresident, and in due course of time would succeed to preferment which would relieve them from overwork, having previously undergone parochial training, which ought to be in all cases a requisite for the acceptance of a benefice. They would not, as now, come to their livings new to the kind of work, after having frittered away their most energetic days in the zoophytic life of the common room. And it does, indeed, seem monstrous that, in the case of the clerical foundations, Fellows should be required to take holy orders by the statutes, and then, if they marry, they should be cut out of the succession to College preferment, the Article of the Church of England expressly declaring that "Bishops, Priests, and Deacons may marry at their discretion," in terms rather recommending the act than otherwise. Colleges appear to me to be relieved from obedience to their statutes when that obedience clashes with the laws and customs of the State and Church to which they belong. And, indeed, it is hard to see how a man puts his College under superior obligations to provide for him, because he continues to enjoy its funds. But I think that, granting the utmost validity to the argument of clogging the succession, the evil is not so great as it would appear at

first sight. It is anything but desirable that in this country too many young men should be tempted to engage in the profession of scholarship or literature by a multiplication of temporary and illusory prizes. Literature with us, except in a few cases, is not remunerative. It is well that it should not be. We do not want many books written, but a few good books. We do not want many professors; we do want many schoolmasters; but the schoolmaster's profession is a specialty, and a knowledge of how to deal with the youthful character is of far more importance than high literary attainments. If a parent wishes to consult the happiness of his sons, in nine cases out of ten he will nearly confine their education to teaching them to ride, shoot, and speak the truth, and then they will be fitted to live and thrive in the colonies, unless they will have lands of their own to farm in the mother country; or he will teach them honesty, and put them into commercial positions to practise that rare virtue. Business is so much an allin-all with our people, that a literary profession is scarcely acknowledged at all. A man engaged in such pursuits is expected to be a clergyman or a barrister, else he is a creature without caste. I do not say whether this ought to be or not; but such is the undeniable fact. Literary prizes, then, ought to be few and far between, but, when once gained, worth having-not bound to the condition of a selfish celibacy. Sinecures ought to be few; but sinecure incomes are undoubtedly wanted by those who would employ their time to the advantage of the world in professorial or literary labour. The emoluments of their pursuits per se do not allow even the ablest men to keep pace with the expenditure of the times. If it be said that even able men would lapse into laziness in case a permanent and unconditional provision were secured to them, I would answer, that such a case would be rare; for in electing to Fellowships, the elector ought to take care to choose none but candidates of known activity of mind; and again, College Fellowships would not be of sufficient value to enable a man to live entirely without labour of some

sort; they would merely keep the wolf from his door, and prevent the constant wear and tear of pecuniary difficulties from impairing his mental elasticity.

CELEBS.-But Fellowships were not founded with the object of securing literary sinecures. It has always been usual, in administering bequests, to consider the wishes of the testator. CELSUS.-And most justly. I do not at all hold with those who would wish to look upon the College foundations as national property, to be administered according to the discretion or caprice of the Government of the time being, and under the unworthy plea that they have been so much tampered with already, that it matters little what further changes are made. But in considering the wishes of testators, in order to prevent gross practical inconsistencies such as exist under the present system, trustees ought to take into account the changes of time, and consider what they would conscientiously believe founders and benefactors to have wished had they been living now. Most of the Colleges were founded under Roman Catholics; a few only under Protestant auspices. The founders and benefactors were all of them men of mark in their time— not retrograde men, but men rather in advance of their age than behind it ; and being liberal in deed as well as word, they doubtless wished to do all possible good with their money. The Roman Catholic founders, as a rule, were not bigots or Jesuits; but they wished, as far as lay in their power, to assert the independence of the English Church of the See of Rome, though they wished at the same time to preserve its Catholic spirit. Accordingly, they founded corporate bodies, which were intended to be an amendment on the monasteries. The advancement of general learning and literature was their first object; but they were not, at the same time, so entirely and romantically unselfish as to wish to reap no personal good from their openhanded benevolence. Such good would not accrue to them in the flesh, but to their souls after their decease. Accordingly, they instituted a body of clerks, whose espe

outside of the cup and platter, and the only power of moral coercion which they possess besides personal influence, which is equally available under any circumstances, consists in confining students to hall, gates, and chapel-viz., making them dine in hall every day, forbidding them to leave College after locking-up, and ordering them to be present at morning and evening prayers; in short, it is much of the nature of a military arrest, and that would not be thought in the army any great moral safeguard. And their superintendence in study amounts to this, that a College tutor, standing midway between the professor and private tutor, is neither the one nor the other; nor can he be. His public lectures are limited to the men of his own College, his private instructions are confined to such spare hours as he can afford to give gratuitously to individual men; and such hours must necessarily be deducted from his own reading, which ought to be a preparation for his public lectures.

CELEBS.-But do you not think the College tutors a most useful body, and a necessary element in the constitution of the University?

CELSUS.-A most useful body I admit they are, but their usefulness would be increased by the dissolution of the body into its members; and a necessary element in the constitution of the University I think they are not, but rather an obstacle to the full development of the University system. As long as the College tutors exist as a body, the offices of the University professors must be nearly honorary The best hours of the forenoon are all taken up by the compulsory attendance of all the undergraduates on College lectures, and the professors can only lecture in their afternoon hours, devoted to exercise and recreation by the custom of the place. Reading undergraduates complain almost universally of the nuisance of necessary attendance on College lectures; because, although the tutor may be most able, he does not happen to lecture on the particular subjects comprised in the curriculum of their study. College lectures are certainly useful, however, as a roll-call for idle men, preventing

them from spending the whole day as they might otherwise do, in hunting or other expensive idleness; but this object might surely be gained by some other means less complicated. The Professorial system cannot be carried out until the system of College tuition is utterly abolished. In some few cases a beginning has been made. More than one College has, with especial liberality of views and true insight into the necessities of the University, set apart a portion of its funds for founding an University Professorship connected with one of its own Fellowships, with liberty to marry. The professor thus enjoys both an academical and a collegiate standing; and he is adequately, though not extravagantly, paid for his labours. The experiment has been most eminently successful, if we can judge by the crowds of students from all parts who gladly avail themselves of the public instructions of these distinguished gentlemen. This good example has also been imitated in part, with similar success, by other Colleges, and success will doubtless lead to further imitation, until the Tutorial system is entirely merged in the Professorial.

CELEBS.-But the private superintendence of the students' studies, how is that to be done?

CELSUS. Unquestionably by a body of men, who, as they exist at present, are indispensable in the instruction of the University, but have no authorised standing or position, being looked upon somewhat in the light of Sudras among Brahmins, or curates among rectors; a body of men, the fruits of whose labours appear in the class-lists and in the exquisite scholarship of some of the leading men of the world in Church, Bar, or Senate; a body of men who work harder, and for less pay, than any other body of men in the University; the private tutors, or Coaches as they are termed by their friends and patrons the undergraduates. Let the ablest of the College tutors or all of them if you please, be endowed as University Professorships; let attendance on a certain number of their lectures be made compulsory on all undergraduates with the pay