ot
divorce accurate thought from accurate speech; but for accuracy, even for
hair-splitting accuracy, of speech the Universities had the definitions
of the Schoolmen. In literature they had yet to discover a concern.
Literature was a thing of the past, inanimate. Nowhere in Europe could it
be felt even to breathe. To borrow a beautiful phrase of Wordsworth's,
men numbered it among 'things silently gone out of mind or things
violently destroyed.'

Nobody quite knows how these Universities began. Least of all can anybody
tell how Oxford and Cambridge began. In Bede, for instance--that is, in
England as the eighth century opens--we see scholarship already moving
towards the _thing_, treading with sure instinct towards the light.
Though a hundred historians have quoted it, I doubt if a feeling man who
loves scholarship can read the famous letter of Cuthbert describing
Bede's end and not come nigh to tears.

And Bede's story contains no less wonder than beauty, when you consider
how the fame of this holy and humble man of heart, who never left his
cloisters at Jarrow, spread over Europe, so that, though it sound
incredible, our Northumbria narrowly missed in its day to become the
pole-star of Western culture. But he was a disinterested genius, and his
pupil, Alcuin, a pushing dull man and a born reactionary; so that, while
Alcuin scored the personal success and went off to teach in the court of
Charlemagne, the great chance was lost.

No one knows when the great Universities were founded, or precisely out
of what schools they grew; and you may derive amusement from the
historians when they start to explain how Oxford and Cambridge in
particular came to be chosen for sites. My own conjecture, that they were
chosen for the extraordinary salubrity of their climates, has met (I
regret to say) with derision, and may be set down to the caprice of one
who ever inclines to think the weather good where he is happy. Our own
learned historian, indeed--Mr J. Bass Mullinger--devotes some closely
reasoned pages to proving that Cambridge was chosen as the unlikeliest
spot in the world, and is driven to quote the learned Poggio's opinion
that the unhealthiness of a locality recommended it as a place of
education for youth; as Plato, knowing naught of Christianity, but gifted
with a soul naturally Christian, '_had selected a noisome spot for his
Academe, in order that the mind might be strengthened by the weakness of
the body._' So diffic