painting, and
his Oxford manner never seem to desert him. We feel, not for the first
time, how dangerous it must be to allow our simple perky unspoiled
Colonials to associate with such deleterious exotic beings, who, though
in fiction horsewhipped or (if heroes) shot in the last chapter, in real
life are so apt to become prosperous city men or respected college
officials.

The Oxford manner is, alas, indefinable; I was going to say indefensible.
Perhaps it is an attitude--a mental attitude that finds physical
expression in the voice, the gesture, the behaviour. Oxford, not
conduct, is three-fourths of life to those who acquire the distemper.
Without becoming personal it is not easy to discuss purely social
aspects, and we must seek chiefly in literature for manifestations of the
phenomenon: in the prose of Matthew Arnold for instance--in the poems of
Mr. Laurence Binyon, typical examples where every thought seems a mental
reservation. Enemies rail at the voice, and the voice counts for
something. Any one having the privilege of hearing Mr. Andrew Lang speak
in public will know at once what I mean--a pleasure, let me hasten to
say, only equalled by the enjoyment of his inimitable writing, so pre-
eminently Oxonian when the subject is not St. Andrews, Folk Lore, or
cricket. Though Oxford men have their Cambridge moments, and beneath
their haughty exterior there sometimes beats a Cambridge heart. Behind
such reserve you would never suspect any passions at all save one of
pride. Even frankly irreligious Oxford men acquire an ecclesiastical pre-
Reformation aloofness which must have piqued Thackeray quite as much as
the refusal of the city to send him to Westminster. He complains
somewhere that the undergraduates wear kid gloves and drink less wine
than their jolly brethren of the Cam. He was thoroughly Cambridge in his
attitude towards life, as you may see when he writes of his favourite
eighteenth century in his own fascinating style. How angry he becomes
with the vices and corruption of a dead past! Now no Oxford essayist
would dream of being angry with the past. How annoyed the sentimental
author of _The Four Georges_ would be with Mr. Street's genial treatment
of the same epoch! It would, however, be the annoyance of a father for
his eldest son, whom he sent to Oxford perhaps to show that an old slight
was forgiven and forgotten.

There have been, of course, plenty of men unravaged by the blithe
contagion