he “goes up to the university” he does not change his habitat.
The married fellow cannot begin life again elsewhere after the 5 or 10 years’ teaching at his college which used to precede his departure for a benefice: the old bachelor, if he stayed on, no longer taught, and new men took his place in the lecture room. But now a fellow cannot renounce the lecture room, for he and his family cannot live on the fellowship. Lecturers are therefore often men past the prime of life, and moreover men who no longer live in daily contact with the undergraduate. New blood comes in seldom, and percolates slowly. On the other hand valuable men stay who would under the old system have left. The influx of the “monstrous regiment” will not however, one hopes, diminish an advantage at present possessed by the seniors at our centres of learning—a general equality of fortune which frees university society from the laborious vulgarity that travails the soul elsewhere, from the general “ponderousness,” as someone has called it, of English life. At least Gray’s advice to Wharton not to bring his wife to Cambridge would now be quite out of place; the “few” women are no longer “squeezy and formal, little skilled in amusing themselves or other people,” and the men are no longer “not over agreeable neither.”
CHAPTER V
UNIVERSITY MEN AND NATIONAL MOVEMENTS
Men who owe nothing to a university—40 great Englishmen—Cambridge men: the scientists, the poets, the dramatists, other literary men, the philosophers, the churchmen, lawyers and physicians, the statesmen. (pp. 250-260.)
National movements: King John and the barons—the peasants’ revolt—York and Lancaster—the new world—Charles and the Parliament—James II. and the University—the Declaration of Indulgence—the Nonjurors—William and Mary and Cambridge whiggery—Jacobitism and Toryism at Cambridge in the reign of Anne—George I. and Cambridge—modern political movements. (pp. 260-269.)
Religious movements: Lollards, the early reformers, the question of the divorce, Lutheranism at Cambridge, later reformers and the Reformation, the English bible, and service books, the Cambridge martyrs, the Puritans, the Presbyterians, the Independents, the Latitudinarians, the Deists, the evangelical movement, the Tractarian movement, anti-calvinism. (pp. 269-281.)
Intellectual movements: the New Learning and the age of Elizabeth—the Royal Society—the Cambridge Platonists—modern science. (pp. 281-291.)