ham House in The Parks, used to lend me his
pony-carriage, which, as it strictly belonged to the Queen, and bore her
crown and cypher, did not pay toll; and, with an undergraduate friend at
my side, I used to snatch a fearful joy from driving at full tilt
through turnpike gates, and mystifying the toll-keeper by saying that
the Queen's carriages paid no toll. For the short remainder of my time
at Oxford I was cut off from riding and all active exercise, and was not
able even to go out in bad weather. It was with me as with Captain
Harville in _Persuasion_--"His lameness prevented him from taking much
exercise; but a mind of usefulness and ingenuity seemed to furnish him
with constant employment within."

* * * * *

Here I must close my recollections of Oxford, and, as I look back upon
those four years--1872-1876--I find my thoughts best expressed by Sir
Arthur Quiller-Couch, who has done for Oxford in his _Alma Mater_ just
what Matthew Arnold did in the preface to _Essays in Criticism_....

"Know you her secret none can utter?
Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown?
Still on the spire the pigeons flutter;
Still by the gateway flits the gown;
Still on the street, from corbel and gutter,
Faces of stone look down.

* * * * *

Still on her spire the pigeons hover;
Still by her gateway haunts the gown;
Ah, but her secret? You, young lover,
Drumming her old ones forth from town,
Know you the secret none discover?
Tell it--when _you_ go down."

_Know you the secret none discover_--none, that is, while they still are
undergraduates?

Well, I think I do; and, to begin with a negative, it is not the secret
of Nirvana. There are misguided critics abroad in the land who seem to
assume that life lived easily in a beautiful place, amid a society which
includes all knowledge in its comprehensive survey, and far remote from
the human tragedy of poverty and toil and pain, must necessarily be
calm. And so, as regards the actual work and warfare of mankind, it may
be. The bitter cry of starving Poplar does not very readily penetrate to
the well-spread tables of Halls and Common-rooms. In a laburnum-clad
villa in The Parks we can afford to reason very temperately about life
in cities where five families camp in one room. But, when we leave
actualities, and come to the region of thought and o