then a large sum, though many a sheet took me at
first more than a week to get ready, copy, collate, understand, and
finally print. If I was interested in any other subject, my exchequer
suffered accordingly--but I could always retrieve my losses by sitting
up late at night. Poor as I was, I never had any cares about money,
and when I once began to write in English for English journals, I had
really more than I wanted. My first article in the _Edinburgh Review_
appeared in October, 1851.

At that time the idea of settling at Oxford, of remaining in this
academic paradise, never entered my head. I was here to print my
Rig-veda and work at the Bodleian; that I should in a few years be an
M.A. of Christ Church, a Fellow of the most exclusive of colleges,
nay, a married Fellow--a being not even invented then--and a professor
of the University, never entered into my wildest dreams. I could only
admire, and admire with all my heart. Everything seemed perfect, the
gardens, the walks in the neighbourhood, the colleges, and most of all
the inhabitants of the colleges, both Fellows and undergraduates. My
ideas were still so purely continental that I could not understand
how the University could do such a thing as incorporate a foreign
scholar--could, in fact, govern itself without a Minister of Education
to appoint professors, without a Royal Commissioner to look after the
undergraduates and their moral and political sentiments. And here at
Oxford I was told that the Government did not know Oxford, nor Oxford
the Government, that the only ruling power consisted in the Statutes
of the University, that professors and tutors were perfectly free so
long as they conformed to these statutes, and that certainly no
minister could ever appoint or dismiss a professor, except the Regius
professors. "If we want a thing done," my friends used to explain to
me, "we do it ourselves, as long as it does not run counter to the
statutes."

But Oxford changes with every generation. It is always growing old,
but it is always growing young again. There was an old Oxford four
hundred years ago, and there was an old Oxford fifty years ago. To a
man who is taking his M.A. degree, Oxford, as it was when he was a
freshman, seems quite a thing of the past. By the public at large no
place is supposed to be so conservative, so unchanging, nay, so
stubborn in resisting new ideas, as Oxford; and yet people who knew it
forty or fifty years ago, like myself, fi