Modern
The senior members of the University are perhaps as interesting as they have ever been. The freshman or other critical stranger to the city finds them less picturesque, if his ideal be anything like that of the youthful Ruskin, who looked for presences like the Erasmus of Holbein or Titian’s Magnificoes, and was disappointed at Christ Church by all save one. For the President or Master, whose absolutism used to be the envy of kings, now bears his honours inconspicuously. The fellows of colleges are no longer, indeed, a distinct and noticeable class, but are, for the most part, purely and simply scholars, or historians, or instructors of youth. The conscientious, capable, and hard-working Don is probably commoner than he has ever been; and his success is great. But even he might echo the cry against a possible tendency towards mere educational efficiency in fellows, which is expressed in the exclamation: “Nothing is so much to be feared[Pg 196] as that we should one day compete with the Board Schools.”
“O goodly usage of those antique times,” when it was a sufficient grace to be a scholar, and it was a kind of virtue to quote from Horace and never to play upon words outside Homer. Here and there such a man survives, always old, married to the place, and yet with a widowed air, looking as if he had crept out of one of the reverend pictures in the hall, and still clear-sighted enough to see the length of Broad Street and regret it, fumbling with the spectacles which he bought to protect his eyes in the first year of railway travelling. No one could draw him quite so happily as the Sub-Rector of Lincoln College, and in his latest book he gives us a charming hint, and there, quite appropriately, but too pathetically, he allows the old scholar to die.
“The Church, indeed,” he writes, “was mouldy enough, and the air within was close and sleep-giving; and as the old parson murmured his sermon twice a Sunday from the high old pulpit, his hearers gradually dropped into a tranquil doze or a pleasant day-dream—all except the old Scholar, who sat just below, holding his hand to his ear, and eagerly looking for one of those subtle allusions, those reminiscences of old reading, or even now and then three words of Latin from Virgil or the Imitatio with which his lifelong friend would strain a point to please him. They had been at school together, and at college together, and now they were spending their last years together, for the old Scholar had come, none of us knew[Pg 198][Pg 197]
MAGDALEN COLLEGE, FROM THE BOTANIC GARDEN
Part of the tower of Magdalen College is seen to the left of the picture, under which are some of the glass houses of the Botanic Garden.
Above the pillar surmounted by a vase appears the roof of the College Hall, and farther to the right sets of rooms and the kitchens.
Three arches of Magdalen Bridge show to the right.