our two great Universities of
Oxford and Cambridge a connotation (secondary, if you will, but valuable
above price) of universality; of standing like great beacons of light,
to attract the young wings of all who would seek learning for their
sustenance. Thousands have singed, thousands have burned themselves, no
doubt: but what thousands of thousands have caught the sacred fire into
their souls as they passed through and passed out, to carry it, to drop
it, still as from wings, upon waste places of the world! Think of
country vicarages, of Australian or Himalayan outposts, where men have
nourished out lives of duty upon the fire of three transient, priceless
years. Think of the generations of children to whom their fathers'
lives, prosaic enough, could always be re-illumined if someone let fall
the word 'Oxford' or 'Cambridge,' so that they themselves came to
surmise an aura about the name as of a land very far off; and then say
if the ineffable spell of those two words do not lie somewhere in the
conflux of generous youth with its rivalries and clash of minds, ere it
disperses, generation after generation, to the duller business of life.
Would you have your mother University, Gentlemen, undecorated by some
true study of your mother-English?

I think not, having been there, and known such thoughts as you will carry
away, and having been against expectation called back to report them.

And sometimes I remember days of old
When fellowship seem'd not so far to seek,
And all the world and I seem'd far less cold,
And at the rainbow's foot lay surely gold,
And hope was strong, and life itself not weak.

My purpose here (and I cannot too often recur to it) is to wean your
minds from hankering after false Germanic standards and persuade you, or
at least point out to you, in what direction that true study lies if you
are men enough to take up your inheritance and believe in it as a glory
to be improved.

Neither Oxford nor Cambridge nor any University on earth can study
English Literature truthfully or worthily, or even at all profitably,
unless by studying it in the category for which Heaven, or Nature (call
the ultimate cause what you will), intended it; or, to put the assertion
more concretely, in any other category than that for which the particular
author--be his name Chaucer or Chesterton, Shakespeare or Shaw--designed
it; as neither can Oxford nor Cambridge nor any University study English
Li