a man of strong religious con- some Heads of Houses of a victions, intensely disliked the "Enthusiasm" which he considered had wrecked both State and Church when the Puritans had the upper hand for nearly twenty years in England. To him "enthusiasm" meant tyranny and fanaticism mixed with much hypocrisy: it had meant the same to the philosophers the founders of the Royal Society, who came to Oxford in 1645-1650 seeking "quiet and freedom and shelter from enthusiasm." Johnson was unconquerably averse to its recrudescence in his own Church and University. When six students, who would not desist from publicly praying and exhorting, were expelled in 1768 from St Edmund Hall, Boswell said to Johnson, "But was it not hard, sir, to expel them, for I am told they were good beings." Johnson replied, "I believe they were good beings, but they were not fit to be in the University of Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field, but we turn her out of a garden." Less familiar than this quotation is the story of the Head of an Oxford college who, many years later, told a candidate for admission when he professed a desire for later date. The history of the Oxford movement has been written from many points of view, critical and sympathetic, by Newman, and Church, and Mosely. It had consequences of many kinds-political, ecclesiastical, and spiritual: it was a religious revival, to use a word which has been applied to another religious movement less stately, picturesque, and intellectual, but who can say less beneficial, than Tractarianism? Revivalism has produced as its permanent embodiment the Salvation Army, which does its work no less vigorously than the High Churchmen, but more exclusively, among the outcasts. Johnson would have involved in one condemnation both the movements, though he, whom "only an obstinate rationality" kept from becoming a Roman Catholic, would have been less hard on Dr Newman than on General Booth. With the later religious movement in Oxford, which began with the Essays and Reviews, Johnson would have had no sympathy whatever; it was based on an "enthusiasm" of a kind specially odious to him, which he would have called the extravagance of reason. In the sixties and the seventies, and in the early eighties, most of the clever young men, and clever young men follow fashion like other people, were by the law of reaction followers of Jowett, or Mark Pattison, or T. H. Green, or Mill, or Herbert Spencer, or Comte, or the uncompromising Huxley. Oxford was a TaνTOTÓMov, a general warehouse of opinions, if not beliefs, among which Christianity held its place, but not a prominent place. It is somewhat of a Tаνтоπλov still, though some of the intellectual fashions have disappeared or have become ghosts of their former selves. Positivism long ago migrated to London; Spencerianism is a ghost; Mill is by no means dead, though his followers are comparatively few and less submissive than they were. The influence of T. H. Green, based on his noble character and personal charm, still endures, though his philosophy is criticised like everything in Oxford except the multiplication-table. New Realism is to have its turn. But the most remarkable and significant change of all is that Christianity of a very definite kind has come back; the acceptance of it is no longer held to be a mark of obscurantism or intellectual inferiority, and it holds many of our most able and earnest men. There would be many Rip Van Winkles in Oxford were the leaders of fifty -even thirty-years ago to revisit the common rooms and halls; they would find themselves in strange surroundings, and would be disappointed and perplexed. Parallel to this change in philosophical and religious thought, and akin to it, was the change in political opinions. Till 1832 Oxford was the stronghold of Toryism, as it had been for many years before the names Whig and Tory came into fashion: in 1848 some of the resident members of the University were Liberals; ten or twelve years later most of them were Liberals,—most at least of those who were taking an active part in its teaching and administration. Party feeling at that time ran high in Oxford. It is not now extinct, but there is no longer need to consider carefully whom to ask to meet whom at dinner. The battles over the University Commission of 1854, over Mr Jowett's stipend, and over the proposal to abolish tests, had inflamed the feelings of the combatants, clergy and laity alike: language was used about opponents, political and academical, which was often silly and discreditable. The present writer was surprised to find, when he came to frequent college common rooms, that the senior members of the University were more given than undergraduates to the sins of the tongue which are forbidden in "Thy duty towards thy neighbour." Much allowance must be made for strength of feeling and strength of language in a small community of men thoroughly in earnest about important questions, brought into very close quarters with each other, and unaccustomed to the 'give and take" which can be learnt only on public platforms, or at the Bar, or in the House of Commons. But it must be confessed that the humanities had not softened manners in Oxford forty years ago. They were softened only by the abolition of tests, which few nowadays would deny to have are the fire, reason is the been beneficial as well as inevitable. There has been a great improvement in Oxford manners and language since then -we may think things about each other but we do not always say them, and when we do say them, it is with more disguised acerbity. water. Of their opponents, some thought vaguely that women are not men-others, that a share, no small one, of the scholarships, colleges, and of the government of the University, must follow the concession of degrees that coeducation would, if complete, entail complications and inconveniences-that Oxford would be more than changed, and quite another Oxford would take its place, of a character unknown, impossible to predict, even to conjecture. Some of the weaker-kneed Friends of Women feared the prospect of becoming the Girondists of this revolution, and suffering the fate of all Girondists, of being carried, metaphorically, on a tumbril to the Martyrs' Memorial amidst shrieks and execrations, because they had raised a storm and endeavoured to control it. Some colleges, one in particular, in which the writer has a special interest, had been, it was rumoured, marked by the women for their own as specially fitted for the realisation of the charming dream of the Princess, which, it was presumed, would involve the expulsion of the present inmates. The result of these objections, some of them based on the selfishness of man, others difficult to state frankly without offence, was that the proposal to give degrees to women was rejected by an overwhelming majority after a formal debate in a large Congregation twelve years ago. The controversy is not closed, for the Chancellor in that great struggle: women of the University announced The question of University degrees for women came much later, for the most ardent reformer had at first enough on his hands to give him full employment, and this reform seemed better reserved for years, perhaps centuries, to come. The academical suffragettes are less violent than the suffragettes who persecute Mr Asquith-no Oxford ladies have been sent to prison for rabbling Heads of Houses, nor have the proctors been molested in the streets. Wiser and more dangerous methods than the use of physical force have been employed the arts of logic and persuasion. The first step had been taken, the thin end of the wedge had been inserted, when women were admitted to the college lectures, and by inevitable consequence to University examinations. In them they gained honours as well as passes "-why should they be refused the degree which is the reward of these qualifications in the case of men? Women by themselves are formidable: when they have logic, or the appearance of it, on their side, they are irresistible. Σύνωμοσαν γὰρ ὄντες ἔχθιστοι τὸ πρὶν πῦρ καὶ θάλασσα that "in his scheme of reform for Oxford he is going to propose that degrees shall be open to women on exactly the same basis as to men." 1 The questions which will be raised in the discussion of any scheme of reform are more numerous and less simple than the enigmas which the Commissioners of 1854 and 1881 tried to unriddle: they had to deal only, or mainly, with gross abuses and to remove restrictions obviously harmful: the work of future reformers must be constructive. They will have to face problems which their predecessors knew not, or ignored, or attempted to solve in a way which left them more difficult than before: the nature and methods of a liberal education; the claims of natural science; the relations between colleges and the University, and between the Professorial and Tutorial systems; a new definition of the local limits of residence which reasonably qualify for membership of Congregation, for the present limits have come to be absurd; a new definition perhaps also of other qualifications for membership of what is, in the first instance, the legislative body in the Uni versity: to these problems for reformers must be added the admission of women to degrees, and of working-men into the University. Who is sufficient for these things? All reforms-religious, political, social, and, not least, academical-must come not from without, but from within, if they are to be real and permanent. A Commission of able persons, chosen with more regard to political considerations than to knowledge, intimate and personal, of our needs and problems, ought not to be let loose on the University unless and until it has been convicted of unwillingness or impotence to reform itself. Even the sharpest of chisels in the hand of the most skilful of carpenters is not the best instrument for mending watch. a But what of the undergraduate? Oxford to most people means him and nothing else, for he is perpetually en évidence, and is incomparably the most interesting thing or person in the University. Hopeless as the task is, an effort must be made to describe him in next month's 'Maga.' P. A. WRIGHT HENDERSON. 1 Times' of October 24, 1908. SIR THOMAS OVERBURY. THOMAS OVERBURY, whose haggard ghost still walks in the secret places of the Tower, was born, a squire's son, in 1581. He was educated in grammar-learning at ComptonScorfen in Warwickshire, and at the age of fourteen entered Queen's College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner. There he devoted himself to the study of polite letters. He cultivated his brilliant talent with assiduity, and when, in 1598, he took his degree by right of birth, he had won the golden praises of his contemporaries. A finished scholar, a poet of just pretension, a wit whose fame far outran his years, he left Oxford with high hopes of preferment, and, like many another youth of promise, took up his abode in the Temple-not to unravel the mysteries of law, but to conquer London. For this conquest an acquaintance with foreign countries was still necessary, and Overbury for a while deserted the tranquil courts of the Temple to learn what lessons of elegance France and Italy might teach him. The Grand Tour of Europe inculcated in his facile nature a knowledge of the arts of life. But it was a journey to Scotland, taken near the time of King James's coronation, that had the deepest influence on his career. "When Sir Thomas Overbury was a little past twenty years old,"-it is thus that his father, Sir Nicholas, told the tale many years afterwards,-"he and John Guilby, his father's chief clerk, were sent (upon a voyage of pleasure) to Edinburgh, with £60 between them. There Thomas met with Sir William Cornwallis, one who knew him in Queen's College at Oxford. Sir Wm. commended him to divers, and among the rest to Robin Carr, then page to the Earl of Dunbar: so they two came along to England together, and were great friends." It is easy to imagine the spirit of raillery with which Overbury described the rough life and uncleanliness of the Scottish capital: these were the commonplaces of English travellers, and there is no doubt that the young Templar found them a whetstone for his merry wit. raillery are as nothing if we set them by the side of the meeting with Robin Carr, whose rise to wealth and glory Overbury shared, and whose ruin followed the disgrace and murder of his friend with tragical swiftness. 1 But wit and 1 In a manuscript in the British Museum is a set of notes to which the following memorandum is affixed, "that I, Nicolas Oldisworth, who wrote this book, ... did deliberately read it over, on Thursday the IXth of Oct. 1637, in the hearing of my old grandfather, Sir Nicolas Overbury, &c., who affirmed the truth of its contents." It is from these notes that I have cited the testimony of Sir Nicholas Overbury. |