given to hospitality, and thoroughly appreciating the opportunities now at his disposal for entertaining a great variety of guests, old and young. Honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, were certainly the portion of his declining years.

The intervening period from 1855 to 1870 presents a very different picture. It shows us Achilles sulking in his tent, the victim of wounded pride and baffled ambition; it shows us, alas, the disloyal colleague, sedulously undermining the influence of the head of the college. Did we not know the weakness of human nature, the bitterness with which he resented Doctor Scott's preferment would be incredible; for Scott had been consistently kind to him as an undergraduate, and had among other things advanced the money necessary to defray the expense of his installation as a fellow. It is, however, the fact that almost from the moment of his rival's election Jowett ostentatiously withdrew himself from the society of the high-table and the commouroom; and the persistency of his attempts to thwart the new master in every conceivable way was never much of a secret. He was, indeed, pre-eminently fond of "getting his own way;" and the pertinacity with which, when in a minority, he would oppose and obstruct was only equalled by the pertinacity with which he would press his advantage with a majority to back him. Had he met with similar treatment when he occupied the post of master himself (and with one or two of the ablest and most influential of the dons he can scarcely be said to have been congenial), the common-room would have been the scene of perpetual discord. The fact that any who differed from him invariably gave way speaks volumes, not merely for their amiability, but also for his strength of will and obstinacy of purpose. It was during this period, too, that Mr. Jowett appeared in one of his most celebrated impersonations, the injured heretic; for, though his orthodoxy had been somewhat blown upon, it was only after his failure to attain the mastership that

he came to be looked upon as a ringleader of the Oxford Liberals.

Much-shall we say a great deal too much?-has been written about the Tractarian movement, comparatively little about the counter tendency. Yet the latter would well repay judicious and discriminating investigation. The mere circumstance that for many years it was the fashionable thing for young men of parts and promise to call them. selves Liberals is conclusive evidence of its strength, and of the powerful influence exercised by its champions. To survey it at this distance of time is to be supplied with a striking illustration of the vanity of human effort. Superficially successful in realizing a much larger proportion of their ideals thau commonly falls to the lot of man, the university Liberals are to be discerned in their later years clad in sackcloth and ashes and bemoaning the futility of their exertions and the eclipse of their dearest doctrines. Pearsou gloomily predicts a débacle when Western civilization shall be engulfed in an overwhelming torrent of Mongolians and other yellow-faces. Pattison scents a hateful recrudescence of idealism and mediævalism in the neo-Hegelian philosophy of Mr. Green. Jowett is inclined to think "that the power of the Church has increased and (in England) is increasing, and ought to be diminished" (ii. 475). Most melancholy sight of all, Mr. Goldwin Smith ruefully contemplates a political world for the creation of which he and his friends are largely responsible and pronounces it all as bad as bad can be. If these are the feelings with which the march of "progress" is saluted by the veterans, what would their sensations have been if the forces of "reaction" had triumphed?

It is true that in their practical nostrums the Oxford Liberals were by no means unanimous. This one clamored for the endowment of research; that for the extension of university teaching to manufacturing towns; a third deemed that the millennium had arrived with the advent to Oxford of the humble "tosher." These and other innumera

ble fads are delightfully gibbeted in the inimitable "Phrontisterion." But a certain unity of principle and purpose un. doubtedly animated the party and held it together, though its commonest expression was more than a little unfortunate. Human nature must, change a good deal before unbridled arrogance becomes popular. Mr. Jowett, with characteristic shrewdness. was able to see himself and his friends as the enemy saw them. "As university reformers," he wrote in 1852, "we must appear to the world rather as seeking an intellectual aristocracy, or, to express it more coarsely, to form good places for ourselves out of the revenues of the colleges, than earnest about anything which the world in general cares for or which can do any extensive good" (1. 212). In exhibiting this distinctive quality, the Oxford Liberals were, no doubt, merely continuing and developing the party tradition. Modesty was never a feature of the Whig or the Radical character. From the date when English politics "settled down" and the familiar division of Whig and Tory became recognized, the Liberals have never been slow to claim for them. selves a very handsome share of all de sirable qualities, whether mental moral. Even in the writings of Steele and Addison we detect the calm selfcomplacency which tacitly assumed that the Whigs possessed a monopoly of good taste, good manners, and good sense; just as in Swift we recognize the violent recoil against all such ludicrous pretensions. The phenomenon repeated itself a century later. The claim to ethical and intellectual superiority was shrilly reasserted by the Edinburgh reviewers, and vehemently contested by the Tories of the Quarterly and still more of "Maga." Cockburn's "Memorials" afford perhaps the most typical instance of such a claim being advanced in perfect good faith and without the slightest conception that there was anything to be urged against it. Addison, to be sure, was humility itself compared with Jeffrey and Cockburn; but Jeffrey and Cockburn were the very embodiment of

or

modesty compared with the Oxford Liberals. In their eyes, not to be a Liberal was to be ipso facto a fool, a jobber, an obscurantist, a knave, a sinner against the light, an enemy of the human race, and a great many other terrible things; nor must the Tory be allowed by any excess of civility or consideration to remain ignorant of his miserable plight. No; the "canker of ecclesiasticism" must be thoroughly eradicated; the incubus of an effete and brutalized aristocracy thrown off; and the world henceforward ruled by its natural leaders-the men of intellect!

We do not say that there were no academic Liberals free from the taint of this odious characteristic. Mr. Jowett himself, though capable enough of rapping out a sharp and biting word upon occasion, was too wise to be deliberately and gratuitously insolent. Others, like Henry Smith, were mercifully preserved by a rich and genuine vein of humor; while others yet again, like Dean Stanley, were so essentially "light horsemen," and their type of mind was so palpably shallow, that though they took an active part in many a hot battle, they excited no per. manent animosity. In Matthew Arnold, too, the elaborately veiled arrogance was often amusing, and nine times out of ten was vented, much 10 the patients' disgust and dismay, upon the "backbone" of the Liberal party in the country. To catch the quality in its highest manifestation the reader must peruse Doctor Arnold on the "Oxford Malignants," or rub up his recollection of Mr. Thorold Rogers's controversial methods, or refresh his memory with a few of Mr. Freeman's outbursts of urbanity, or, best of all, turn to Mark Pattison's "Memoirs." There nearly every other person mentioned is either a "flunkey" or a "crétin;" this one is "puzzle-headed," that the victim of "abject piety," while the fortunate writer confesses to being so constituted that he cannot "see anything being done without an immediate suggestion of how it might be better done." Not a touch of kindliness, not a note of sympathy for the commonplace and less

richly gifted orders of mankind, not a solitary gleam of humor! Rather than fight under leaders such as these, it were infinitely better to have made a stout stand for the losing side beneath the banner of the greatest metaphysician and philosopher who has adorned the Church of England since the days of Butler.

The intellectual arrogance to which we have referred may have found some justification in the exceptional abilities of many of the Liberal leaders at the university. The misfortune was that they contrived to impart it to many of their disciples to whom they could in nowise communicate a share of their brains, and in whom the quality was not only offensive but grotesque. It is indeed this self-satisfied vanity, this superlative conceit, which constitutes the true differentia of the species "prig," and assuredly in no age and in no country has that most detestable of the harmless variet'es of the genus humanum flourished to the same extent as at Oxford during the last half-century. A few individuals of the class may by accident have been Tories, but an enormous majority have always been of the Liberal complexion. Some of the latter, it is true, have been lucky enough to eliminate the poison from their systems, more or less, and by more frequent commerce with the world at large-e.g., in colonial governorships and other similar offices into which their friends have been only too happy to job them-have been brought into a much more healthy, and almost a normal, frame of mind. Others experienced an extremely peremptory awakening during the Home Rule crisis. But there are few exceptions to the general rule, Once a prig, always a prig: and most of the kind continue to be victim of the old monomania till their dying day. Such are the persons who used to brag loudly about the overwhelming predominance of Liberal principles among men of eminence in scholarship, literature, and science; and who since 1886 have been compelled to rest con. tent with the empty satisfaction of railing at the Jebbs, the Leckys, and the

Huxleys, who with all but absolute unanimity have rallied to the cause of the union. No one who was not an eyewitness of the phenomenon would credit the "airs" which mediocre young men of Liberal opinions once gave themselves at Oxford on the score of some fancied superiority in ability, learning, and refinement. Happily the disease supplies its own best antidote. Liberal principles, or what pass for principles, are naturally attractive to ingenuous youth; something to counteract their charm is highly desirable; and many a high-flying Tory has to thank his Radical contemporaries for involuntarily driving him into the right path by force of sheer re

pulsion.

As regards the country generally, the case has been much the same. A pompous parade of talent and "culture" does a party no good in the long-run. Give an academic Liberal plenty of rope, and he is certain to "put everybody's back up." The Tory party may have been from time to time unfortunate in losing the services of young men of ability whom the fashion of the moment drove into the Liberal ranks; but it has gained infinitely more by never having had a Courtney, a Morley, or a Lowe. The truth is that the Tories, alike from principle and tradition, are necessarily more in touch with every section of the community than their opponents. Now, the great mass of the English people understand and secretly like an aristocracy of birth judiciously tempered with wealth. They have no insuperable objection to an unqualified aristocracy of birth; and they would probably tolerate, with periodical fits of restiveness, a pure plutocracy. But there are two things which neither they nor any self-respecting race of men would endure for any length of time; and these are, an aristocracy of selfconstituted "saints," and an aristocracy of "intellect."

We have not wandered so far from Mr. Jowett as may be supposed; for Balliol was the chosen haunt of the prig, and many was the prig of promise who passed through his hands. While

not really a prig himself, he got the credit of being the cause of priggishness in others, though perhaps he was only to blame in not warning them off a very obvious and well-marked shoal. He did his best, we honestly believe, to clear his mind of cant, and we can inagine him secretly writhing at the loudmouthed dictum of some egregious "social reformer," that "what Balliol thinks to-day, England thinks to-morrow!" He could certainly play the candid friend to some purpose, and there were several points on which he refused to subscribe to the orthodox Lib. eral confession. He was not ashamed to put in a good word for our old ally Napoleon III., and his sympathies were all with France in her struggle with Germany. He never took kindly to the movement for the higher education of women, and greatly feared that in the future there might be "a neglect of accomplishments, especially music and drawing, which I shall always consider a very important element of female, and, perhaps, of all education" (ii. 291). He nourished no great enthusiasm for "oppressed nationalities," and was a hearty Turcophil during the RussoTurkish war. He had a liking for Lord Beaconsfield, but always distrusted Mr. Gladstone, in whom, it is true, the Oxford Liberals, suspecting his clerical proclivities, reposed but little confidence. Much more to his taste were the pre-reform statesmen, whom he considered to have been more loyal and faithful to one another than the politicians of to-day (ii. 395). He was astoundingly ignorant of science. He rightly held it "impossible to convert Shelley into a decent and honorable man" (ii. 318). In a letter written in 1846 he expresses views as to the English aristocracy which Gifford or Croker, though they would have cheerfully indorsed them, would have thought twice before printing (i. 151). Above all, he was a thorough-going "Jingo." He complained that the Liberals in 1878 were becoming bitter and “un-English," and he would have repuIdiated with scorn Sam Rogers's placent and uisgraceful boast that he

com

"had never wished well to his Majesty's armies."

These are notable divergences from the beaten track of Liberalism, and must have cost a considerable effort. But in other respects his independence of mind broke down, and he was content to go on mumbling the hallowed formulæ. He seemed to find a peculiar charm-and many others have done the same in the very name of "Liberal." "I used to think myself a Liberal," he writes in 1882, "but sometimes fear that I am in danger of becoming a Tory, though I struggle against this as much as I can" (ii. 210). He seems to have felt himself "thirled" to the thing called Liberalism, and bound consequently to oppose and thwart its foes. How else could he have persuaded himself that the author of the "Vie de Jésus" and "L'Abbesse de Jouarre" was "a really great and good man"? For what other reason could he have invited Colenso to occupy the pulpit of Balliol chapel-Colenso with whose methods he had little in common? We readily acquit him of the deliberate desire or intention to wound the deepest feelings of those who still asked for the old paths. Yet he was by no means disinclined to irritate them, almost mischievously, in lesser matters. "I rather like," he writes in 1893, "when preaching in Westminster Abbey, to take the liberty of saying a word in favor of some great dissenter or saintly infidel, whose praise is not heard in all the churches" (ii. 470); and he would maintain that Voltaire had done more good than all the fathers of the Church put together! The spirit of such utterances is the key to many little problems in the master's conduct. It helps to explain the Sunday evening concerts; it entirely explains that memorable Sunday afternoon concert in the garden quad., when a military band discoursed quasi-sacred music to a disorderly mob of ruffians from the town who took the college by storm. The biographers say nothing of the incident; and the experiment was not repeated. The same feeling also supplies a clue to some of his public appearances which

Another way in which the master's strain of Liberalism displayed itself was his preference for being on the winning side, and his nervous solicitude to have a finger in every scheme that held out a fair prospect of success. He loved to be dans le mouvement, and would have hated it to be supposed that he had banned anything which ultimately turned out to be popular. Thus he relaxed somewhat of his open hostility to the "higher education" of women, when he found the movement gathering strength. So, too, when the Toynbee Hall project was mooted, though his soul must have revolted at the deluge of nonsense which then swept over the college, he appeared at a meeting in hall and bestowed a few words of chilly approbation on the scheme. He was from the first a supporter of the preposterous "University Extension" movement, perhaps the most laughable of the many farces which have been played on the Oxford stage. It has, no doubt, the merit of providing many excellent young gentlemen of moderate abilities with a "living wage;" but there can have been little really to appeal to the common sense of Mr. Jowett either in its solemn affectation of seriousness, its impudent demands upon the public purse, or its month of picnicking at Oxford in the long vacation. It may be conjectured, indeed, that many developments of university "reform" which he lived to see, and against which he never opened his lips, were secretly distasteful to him. And he, too, like the other Oxford Liberals whom we have mentioned, was to taste the bitterness of fruition, and the

There is greater discontent [he remarks with astonishing and relentless cruelty] in Oxford now than formerly. The younger men want to marry, and they have no money. They want to write, and have no originality. They want to be scholars, and have no industry. They want to be fine gentlemen, and are deficient in manners. When they have families they will be at their wits' end how to provide for them. Many of them have the fretfulness of parvenus, and will always have this unfortunate temper of mind. Had Burgon possessed either the heart or the head to formulate so pointed an indictment against the outcome of fifty years' agitation, what a howl of execration would have arisen against the ferocious bigot!

It was, however, far more in connection with the college than the university that Mr. Jowett's best work was performed. It was the college that most occupied his thoughts, the college that lay closest to his heart. During the whole period of his mastership his will there was law, and even during the latter part of Scott's reign he swayed its destinies. No human being could have ruled such an institution for so long a time without committing some errors, and there were, unquestionably, details in his management to which exception might be taken. Perhaps he permitted the college to grow too large, but we doubt if he could have kept it small. Perhaps he was too prone to encourage the residence of Parthians, Medes, Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia, and members of tribes even more remote. Yet we doubt if they did anybody any harm, though we are quite sure that any of their number who happened to be professing Christians from the Levant would have done so if they could. With much more force it may be urged that the introduction of the organ into the hall, with all its consequences, was a grave mistake. We should be disposed to concede that the master's better judgment deserted him