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I remember when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen's narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived.
Mr Andrew Lang has remarked that it is "the only College in Oxford which has not been fiddled with"; this is high praise, and gratefully accepted. One defect the College has: the resources of the Founders sufficed to build only one quadrangle; they had not counted the cost of the stately Chapel and Hall, and little was left for College rooms. When will our benefactor come?
If Europe be literary, to whom does she owe this more than to these men of letters? Is it not to their noble passion of amassing through life those magnificent collections, which often bear the names of their founders from the gratitude of a following age? Venice, Florence, and Copenhagen, Oxford, and London, attest the existence of their labours.
A book may be a book, although there is neither Latin nor Greek, nor travel, nor experience in fact 'nothing' in it; and though, like myself, you may pay an Oxford professor a thousand a year to correct your proofs, you may still miss immortality.
"I knew the best people when I was at Oxford, why can I not know them now? Here we are doing the same thing from year's end to year's end; why, with our money we ought to be hob-nobbing with the duke." In moments of dejection this was one of Willy's commonest thoughts. "I did my best, but I was opposed. Father doesn't care, and as for the girls, they'll take up with any man so long as he is young.
I repeated the gist of this to my man Weems was his name, by the way, of New, Oxford, so he said and told him he could get the thing for about twelve lire, if he cared about it. And, to cut the yarn short, he did buy it for twelve-fifty, and left the shop feeling that he had been swindled out of at least half a crown. "What's your purchase about?" I asked when we were in the street again.
He made a speech which I listened to with great pleasure, and told the House what some of us, perhaps, did not know before; but if I had been connected, as he is, with Canada, I would have addressed the House from a Canadian point of view. What is it that the Member for Oxford says?
I am worried by the sense of not being able to pack in time to catch my train, or else I am compelled to go back to Oxford and try to pass an examination under impossible and humiliating conditions. Indeed, I don't think I can ever remember a dream, except this one about my son, which was of a non- egotistical kind, that is, in which somebody else speaks, and of which I am not the centre.
Would the "philosophy of religion," which is the perennial interest of Oxford, appeal to the fashionable or business-like crowd which sits under the Dome? Would his personal influence reach beyond the precincts of the Cathedral into the civil and social and domestic life of London?
In England, besides Dean Church's 'Oxford Movement, we have biographies by R.H. Hutton and W. Barry, and appreciations or depreciations by E. Abbott, Leslie Stephen, Froude, Mark Pattison, and several others. The interest is mainly personal and psychological. Newman's writings, and his life, are a 'human document' in a very peculiar degree.
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