OXFORD and Cambridge belong at once to

the past and to the present. These university cities, with their numerous colleges, are peculiar to England. In Canada and the United States each college is a university. But the universities of Oxford and Cambridge are federations of colleges. The university is the federal authority, holds the examinations, grants all the degrees and honors, and through its staff of professors carries on the higher teaching; though the duties of an Oxford or Cambridge professor are held to consist as much in the advancement of learning or science as in teaching, with which he is not overburdened. It is governed by a university council and a legislature. But each college is a corporation in itself, having, so to speak, its own state rights, holding and administering its own estates, governed by its own head and fellows, exercising discipline over its own students within its walls, and conducting the ordinary teaching through its staff of tutors. The immediate and the closer tie of the student is to his college, while the higher tie is to the university. Originally, Oxford and

Cambridge were like the German universities at the present day, the students not being collected in colleges, but boarding in private houses or in hostels. In the thirteenth century, when there was a great awakening of intellectual life in Europe, students flocked to the English as well as to the other universities. There being then few books, knowledge was to be attained only by hearing the professors, who taught wherever they could find a hall or a stand, while the eager crowd of students drank the words of wisdom and power from their lips. Those were the days in which Roger Bacon first kindled at Oxford the lamp of science. Research, since the days of the school philosophy, has become more rational and more fruitful; but never perhaps has it been so full of hope and romance as it was in the thirteenth century. Merton College is the first regular college, and the dark little quadrangle, called, nobody knows why, "Mob Quad," is the cradle of collegiate life. The new institution met the needs of the time; it prospered and was imitated. College after college grew up at both

Oxford and Cambridge. The taste for founding them waxed as that for founding monasteries waned. Pre-eminent among them at Oxford were New College, founded by William

MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD.

of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, and Chancellor of Edward III, to which a school for boys at Winchester was attached as a seed-plot; Magdalen College, the loveliest of all homes of learning, founded by William of Waynflete, another Bishop of Winchester, and Chancellor of Henry VI, in the stormy days of the Wars of the Roses; Christchurch, the splendid conception of Wolsey, and magnificent still, though shorn of half its projected grandeur by its founder's fall; and at Cambridge, Trinity, with its ample courts and the pictures of Newton, Bentley, and Bacon in its noble hall. The type of all is a quadrangle of semimonastic character, a common dining-hall, and a domestic chapel. Gradually the colleges absorbed the free university, and at last all students were constrained by law to be members of colleges. In the Catholic middle ages intellectual institutions were clerical; and this requirement surviving, with a mass of other medieval and semi-monastic regula tions embodied in the Statutes of Founders, the

epoch to which they belonged, paralyzed the colleges after the Reformation, and made them and the universities which they had absorbed little more than seminaries of the clerical profession. Oxford especially sank

into an organ of the Jacobite clergy and their party. The consequence was a century and a half of literary and scientific torpor, redeemed by a few great names, of which Cambridge, where practically clericism prevailed least, had the most illustrious. With the renewal of progress in the present century càme reform, or rather emancipation; and Oxford and Cambridge are once more in the van of intellectual England, though they never can be again what they were in the thirteenth century, when the only source of knowledge was the oral teaching of the professor. Perhaps they will always be centers of learning more than of experimental science, which takes the world for its field.

A great change has lately come not only over the literary, but over the social life of the colleges. The medieval fraternities of students being clerical, were celibate, nor did the structure and arrangements of the college admit family life. From the retention of the statutable celibacy, while medieval asceticism was discarded, grew the social life of the college Common Room. That life was pleasant enough while the fellow was young; but its luxury palled at last, and as years crept on, it became dreary, and was gladly exchanged for a college benefice, on which the fellow could marry. The retention of celibacy indeed had another and a curious effect on specially clerical and religious natures; combined with the medieval character of the buildings and associations it had a tendency to revive the monk, and thus Oxford colleges produced Newman and the leaders of the Anglo-Catholic reaction, as two centuries before they had been the nursing mothers of the ecclesiastical reaction under Laud. But now the rule for

TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

celibacy has been relaxed, and a circle of married professors and tutors has come into existence, which, combining intellectuality with the simplicity of living enforced by moderate incomes, forms a society about as pleas