hat they liked it; whereas we can now deal with things
reasonably, and refuse to be saddled with what we do not want."

I confess I was not sorry to cut short with a question his glorifications
of the age he lived in. Said I: "How about the smaller towns? I suppose
you have swept those away entirely?"

"No, no," said he, "it hasn't gone that way. On the contrary, there has
been but little clearance, though much rebuilding, in the smaller towns.
Their suburbs, indeed, when they had any, have melted away into the
general country, and space and elbow-room has been got in their centres:
but there are the towns still with their streets and squares and market-
places; so that it is by means of these smaller towns that we of to-day
can get some kind of idea of what the towns of the older world were
like;--I mean to say at their best."

"Take Oxford, for instance," said I.

"Yes," said he, "I suppose Oxford was beautiful even in the nineteenth
century. At present it has the great interest of still preserving a
great mass of pre-commercial building, and is a very beautiful place, yet
there are many towns which have become scarcely less beautiful."

Said I: "In passing, may I ask if it is still a place of learning?"

"Still?" said he, smiling. "Well, it has reverted to some of its best
traditions; so you may imagine how far it is from its nineteenth-century
position. It is real learning, knowledge cultivated for its own sake--the
Art of Knowledge, in short--which is followed there, not the Commercial
learning of the past. Though perhaps you do not know that in the
nineteenth century Oxford and its less interesting sister Cambridge
became definitely commercial. They (and especially Oxford) were the
breeding places of a peculiar class of parasites, who called themselves
cultivated people; they were indeed cynical enough, as the so-called
educated classes of the day generally were; but they affected an
exaggeration of cynicism in order that they might be thought knowing and
worldly-wise. The rich middle classes (they had no relation with the
working classes) treated them with the kind of contemptuous toleration
with which a mediaeval baron treated his jester; though it must be said
that they were by no means so pleasant as the old jesters were, being, in
fact, _the_ bores of society. They were laughed at, despised--and paid.
Which last was what they aimed at."

Dear me! thought I, how apt history is to reverse contem