From my childhood I had heard endless tirades and much of what is now called "blowing" about this ancient city, and my youth (1840-42) suffered not a little disappointment. The old place, still mostly resembling an overgrown monastery-village, lies in the valley of the Upper Thames, a meadowland drained by two ditches; the bigger or Ise, classically called the Isis, and the lesser the Charwell. This bottom is surrounded by high and healthy uplands, not as the guide-books say "low scarce-swelling hills that softly gird the old town;" and these keep off the winds and make the riverine valley, with its swamped meads and water-meadows, more fenny and feverish even than Cambridge. The heights and woods bring on a mild deluge between October 1st and May 1st; the climate is rainy as that of Shap in Westmoreland (our old home) and, as at Fernando Po and Singapore, the rain it raineth more or less every day during one half of the year. The place was chosen by the ancient Britons for facility of water transport, but men no longer travel by the Thames and they have naturally neglected the older road. Throughout England, indeed a great national work remains to be done. Not a river, not a rivulet, but what requires cleaning out and systematic excavation by élévateurs and other appliances of the Suez Canal. The channels filled up by alluvium and choked by the American weed, are now raised so high that the beds can no longer act as drains: at Oxford for instance the beautiful meadows of Christ Church are little better than swamps and marshes, the fittest homes for Tertiana, Quartana and all the fell sisterhood: a blue fog broods over the pleasant site almost every evening, and a thrust with the umbrella opens up water. This is the more inexcusable as the remedy would be easy and by no means costly: the river-mud, if the ignorant peasants only knew the fact, forms the best of manures; and this, instead of being deposited in spoil-heaps on the banks for the rain to wash back at the first opportunity, should be carried by tram-rails temporarily laid down and be spread over the distant fields, thus almost paying for the dredge works. Of course difficulties will arise: the management of the Thames is under various local "Boards," and each wooden head is able and aye ready to show its independence and ill temper at the sacrifice of public interests to private fads.
Hence the climate of Oxford is detestable. Strong undergraduates cannot withstand its nervous depression and the sleeplessness arising from damp air charged with marsh gases and bacteria. All students take time to become acclimatized here, and some are never acclimatized at all. And no wonder, when the place is drained by a fetid sewer of greenish yellow hue containing per 10,000, 245 parts of sewage. The only tolerable portion of the year is the Long Vacation, when the youths in mortar-boards all vanish from the view, while many of the oldsters congregate in the reformed convents called Colleges.
Climate and the resolute neglect of sanitation are probably the chief causes why Oxford never yet produced a world-famous and epoch-making man, while Cambridge can boast of Newton and Darwin. The harlequin city of domes and spires, cribs and slums shows that curious concurrence of opposites so common in England. The boasted High Street is emblematical of the place, where moral as well as material extremes meet and are fain to dwell side by side. It is a fine thoroughfare branching off into mere lanes, neither these nor that apparently ever cleaned. The huge buildings of scaling, mouldering stone are venerable-looking piles which contrast sadly with the gabled cottages of crepi, hurlin, or wattle and dab; and the brand-new store with its plate-glass windows hustles the old-fashioned lollipop-shop. As regards minor matters there are new market passages but no Public Baths; and on Sundays, the stands are destitute of cabs, although with that queer concession to democracy which essentially belongs to the meaner spirited sort of Conservatism, "'busses" are allowed to ply after 2 p.m., when the thunder of bells somewhat abates.
Old "Alma Mater," who to me has ever been a "durissima noverca," dubs herself "University;" and not a few of her hopefuls entre faiblesse et folie, still entitle themselves "University men." The title once belonged to Oxford but now appertains to it no more. Compare with it the model universities of Berlin, Paris and Vienna, where the lists of lecturers bear the weightiest names in the land. Oxford is but a congeries of twenty-one colleges and five halls or hostels, each educating its pupils (more or less) with an especial eye to tutors' fees and other benefices, the vested rights of the "Dons." Thus all do their best to prevent the scholars availing themselves of University, as opposed to Collegiate, lectures; and thus they can stultify a list of some sixty-six professors. This boarding-school system is simply a dishonest obstacle to students learning anything which may be of use to them in after-life, such as modern and Oriental languages, chemistry, anthropology and the other -ologies. Here in fact men rarely progress beyond the Trivium and the Quadrivium of the Dark Ages, and tuition is a fine study of the Res scibilis as understood by the Admirable Crichton and other worthies, circa A.D. 1500. The students of Queen Elizabeth's day would here?and here only?find themselves in congenial company. Worse still, Oxford is no longer a "Seat of learning" or a "House of the Muses," nor can learned men be produced under the present system. The place has become a collection of finishing schools, in fact little better than a huge board for the examination of big boys and girls.
Oxford and her education are thoroughly disappointing; but the sorest point therein is that this sham University satisfies the hapless Public, which knows nothing about its fainéance. It is a mere stumbling-block in the way of Progress especially barring the road to one of the main wants of English Education, a great London University which should not be ashamed to stand by Berlin, Paris and Vienna.
Had the good knight and "Pious Founder," Sir Thomas Bodley, who established his library upon the ruins of the University Bibliotheca wrecked by the "Reformation," been able to foresee the condition of Oxford and her libraries?Bodleian and Radcliffean?in this latter section of the XIXth century, he would hardly, I should hope, have condemned English students and Continental scholars to compulsory residence and labour in places so akin to the purgatorial.
APPENDIX B.
THE THREE UNTRANSLATED TALES IN MR. E. J. W. GIBB'S "FORTY
VEZIRS."