. Paris, greatest of all, has kept her renown;
but you shall search the slums of the Latin Quarter in vain for the sixty
or seventy Colleges that, before the close of the fifteenth century, had
arisen to adorn her, the intellectual Queen of Europe. In Bologna, the
ancient and stately, almost alone among the continental Universities,
survive a few relics of the old collegiate system--the College of Spain,
harbouring some five or six students, and a little house founded for
Flemings in 1650: and in Bologna the system never attained to real
importance.

But in England where, great as London is, the national mind has always
harked to the country for the graces of life, so that we seem by instinct
to see it as only desirable in a green setting, our Universities, planted
by the same instinct on lawns watered by pastoral streams, have suffered
so little and received as much from the years that now we can hardly
conceive of Oxford or Cambridge as ruined save by 'the unimaginable touch
of Time.' Of all the secular Colleges bequeathed to Oxford, she has lost
not one; while Cambridge (I believe) has parted only with Cavendish. Some
have been subsumed into newer foundations; but always the process has
been one of merging, of blending, of justifying the new bottle by the old
wine. The vengeance of civil war--always very much of a family affair in
England--has dealt tenderly with Oxford and Cambridge; the more
calculating malignity of Royal Commissions not harshly on the whole.
University reformers may accuse both Oxford and Cambridge of

Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade:

but with those sour men we have nothing here to do: like Isaak Walton's
milkmaid we will not 'load our minds with any fears of many things that
will never be.'

But, as they stand, Oxford and Cambridge--so amazingly alike while they
play at differences, and both so amazingly unlike anything else in the
wide world--do by a hundred daily reminders connect us with the Middle
Age, or, if you prefer Arnold's phrase, whisper its lost enchantments.
The cloister, the grave grace in hall, the chapel bell, the men hurrying
into their surplices or to lectures 'with the wind in their gowns,' the
staircase, the nest of chambers within the oak--all these softly
reverberate over our life here, as from belfries, the mediaeval mind.

And that mediaeval mind actively hated (of partial acquaintance or by
anticipation) almost everything w