rise on the inward vision under the spell of this glimpse of the venerable town on the Isis. And with them comes that which no visible portraiture can represent; the Old World silence and peace, the ripe loveliness, the brooding presence of ancient memories! One feels here the deepest spell of that history which, although localised on an alien continent, is still the background of his own life; that history which lives in names as familiar as the names of those who stand nearest us, in thoughts that are our constant companions, in words whose music is never silent in our memory. Melancholy indeed must be the lot of one who could sit under these ancient trees in this ancient world, where nature and art conspired centuries ago to lay eye and imagination under a common spell, and not feel himself in some sense one of the heirs of this incomparable. inheritance bequeathed by history, art, and scholarship to this busy, changing modern world. From the day, now more than five centuries past, when the princely generosity of that princely scholar and man, William of Wykeham, opened the

noble quadrangle of New College to "seventy scholars studying in the faculties," to this spring day, when the limes are green and the soft April skies spread over spire and tower, this place has been sacred to the "things of the mind.”

To recall the names of the Oxford scholars, from Roger Bacon and Wyclif to Jowett and Pattison, is to revive the most splendid traditions of English learning, and to traverse step by step the great stages of the intellectual growth of the modern world mediævalism, with its kindred. scholasticism; the Renaissance, with its ardent teachers of the new learning; the Reformation, whose visible witness to liberty and conscience stands in St. Giles. Street; the broad, rich movement of recent scholarship associated with a score of famous names. One may look through Mr. Hogg's eyes into Shelley's rooms in University College, where the slight, shy poet carries on his chemical experiments, or watch him when on Magdalen Bridge he abruptly snatches a baby from its mother's arms to interrogate it concerning pre-existence; or take note of Addison

meditating under the elms by the Cherwell; or of Johnson in his poor chamber in Pembroke Gate tower; or study the faces of Wolsey and Gladstone as they hang in the hall of Christ Church; or strive to recall, in the week-day solitude of St. Mary's, the spell of those sermons spoken sixty years ago from its pulpit by one of the masters of English speech, who has been. also a master of the things of the spirit. One may find all shrines of ancient worship and consult all spirits of ancient wisdom in this beautiful city," so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!" Well might the poet and scholar who loved her and honoured her with his own delicate genius, his own manly independence, add: "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?"