ill-opinion_ I have had of that place,
and hope to be farther obliged by a very good _account_ of my son."

Old Stephen Penton may have had a rambling head; but unless I have thumbed
the bloom off his narrative in my attempt to summarise it, the reader will
allow that he knew how to write. He gives us the whole scene in the
fewest possible touches: he wastes no words in describing the personages
in his small comedy--comic idyll I had rather call it, for after a fashion
it reminds me of the immortal chatter between Gorgo and Praxinoe in the
fifteenth idyll of Theocritus. There the picture is: the honest
opinionated country squire; the acidulous tutor; the coltish son; the
fond, foolish, fussing mother; the prinking young ladies with their curls
and romantic notions; the colours of all as fresh as if laid on yesterday,
the humour quite untarnished after two hundred years. And I wonder the
more at the vivacity of this little sketch because, as many writers have
pointed out, no one has yet built upon University life a novel of anything
like first-class merit, and the conclusion has been drawn that the
elements of profound human interest are wanting in that life. "Is this
so?" asks the editor of Stephen Penton's reminiscences in a volume
published by the Oxford Historical Society--

"In spite of the character given to Oxford of being a city of short
memories and abruptly-ended friendships, in spite of the inchoative
qualities of youths of eighteen or twenty, especially in respect to
the 'ruling passion' so dear to novelists, yet surely in the three or
four years spent at Oxford by an incredible company of young students
'fresh from public schools, and not yet tossed about and hardened in
the storms of life'--some of them Penton's 'finest youths,' some
obviously otherwise--there must be, one would think, abundance of
romantic incident awaiting its Thackeray or Meredith. For how many
have these years been the turning point of a life! . . ."

There at any rate is the fact: _the_ novel of University life has not been
written yet, and perhaps never will be. I am not at all sure that _The
Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green_ do not mark the nearest approach to it--
save the mark! And I am not at all sure that _The Adventures of Mr.
Verdant Green_ can be called a novel at all, while I am quite certain it
cannot be called a novel of first-class merit. _Tom Brown at Oxford_
still