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XTHE SEASON AS IT ISThat delicate critic, the late Mr. William Cory, observes in one of his letters that Virgil's"Sunt lacrymæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt"has its modern equivalent in Wordsworth's"Men are we, and must grieve when even the shadeOf that which once was great is passed away."The full luxury of that grief is reserved for those who, a decade hence, shall moralize on "the London Season," for the thing which now we so describe will then have utterly perished, and its name will only arouse a tender and regretful emotion. Even now we have seen its glories fade, and soon it will have shared the fate of those Venetian splendours which Wordsworth mourned. But in the meantime it still exists, though in a vastly different form from that which it wore in mid-Victorian years. Just now I was describing some of the changes which have occurred since the distant days when Bulwer-Lytton and Lord Beaconsfield described London in May; and, following humbly in their wake, I endeavoured todepict it as it was when I had my part in it. But change only yields place to change. Society, like the individuals who compose it, passes onward in perpetual vicissitude. As Shelley says, "Naught may endure but mutability." So the London Season of 1906 differs as notably from the Season of 1880 as the Season of 1880 from that of 1846. Let me catalogue some of the changes and try to account for them. In the first place, the Season is much less exactly circumscribed by dates. In days gone by, it began with the Opening of Parliament, which was always about the 7th of February, and it lasted, with its regular intermissions for Easter and Whitsuntide, till the last week of July. Then Society transported itself in turn to Goodwood, to Cowes, and to a German watering-place or a Scotch moor, according to its physical condition, and it was darkly rumoured that, if people found themselves compelled by domestic or financial reasons to remain in London during August, they sought to escape detection by keeping the windows fronting the street closely shuttered, and lived in their back rooms in unbroken contemplation of the leads and the mews. If you chanced to meet a man in Piccadilly in September, you might be sure that he would be wearing country clothes and would assure you that he was only "passing through" between Doncaster and Scotland. Nowadays the Season has no particular limits. London is nearly as full in Decemberas it is in May. Dinners and plays and suppers at restaurants are as frequent, and, barring the fogs, as bright, at Christmas as at Midsummer. Even in September Clubland is not deserted; and there are people bold enough to defy the world by returning from their summer exodus as early as October. The reason for the change, as for many others like it, is the reduction of territorial incomes. 1880 may be taken as, roughly, the last of the good years for agriculture. The incessant rains of 1879 had even then begun to tell their tale. Tenants were asking for big reductions, and farms hitherto eagerly sought were becoming unlettable. I know a landowner on a great scale who, a year or two later, only pocketed 10 per cent. of his income from land, whereas five years before he would have thought an abatement of 10 per cent. disastrous. All this has told increasingly on social life, for people found themselves unable to keep both a country house and a London house going at the same time, and, being driven to choose between the two, often decided to let the country house and its shooting and make London their headquarters for the whole year. So, by degrees, autumn faded imperceptibly into winter, winter into spring, and spring into summer. Each season in its turn found people dwelling peaceably in their urban habitations, entertaining and being entertained; and so "theSeason" lost its sharp edges. The meeting of Parliament broughtno perceptible change in the aspect of the town. "High Midsummer Pomps" were no longer so "high" as in former years, but,per contra, there was much more gaiety in the autumn and winter and early spring.Another cause which has contributed to the effacement of the ancient time-marks is that the Court tends to disregard them. Under the present reign, Windsor Castle has become as much a social centre as Buckingham Palace. There are banquets in St. George's Hall in December, as well as garden-parties on the the Slopes in June; and so, under the action of Royal influence, the social seasons melt into one another, like the hues of the prism. Then, again, the practice of the "Weekend," imported from Lancashire and sanctioned by Westminster, helps to denude the town in summer; for the "end" tends naturally to prolong itself till it overlaps the beginning, and Friday-to-Tuesday parties, treading on the heels of Whitsuntide and to be followed in quick succession by Ascot, make mish-mash of what was aforetime "an entire and perfect chrysolite"—a complete and continuous whole.In describing my hero of 1880 as he surveyed his evening's amusements and chose the most rewarding, I took for granted that he had at least three balls to choose from. Nowadays he is lucky if he has one. Here again, and conspicuously, agricultural depression has made itsmark. In the years between 1870 and 1880, during an unbroken spell of good trade and good harvests, rich people struggled with one another for a vacant night on which to entertain their friends. For example, Lady A. had just brought out a daughter, and wished to give a ball for her benefit. Say that she set her affections on Monday the 28th of May. Before she issued her cards she took counsel with all her friends, for in those days ball-giving mothers were a sort of Limited Company, and all knew one another. She found that Mrs. B. had mentally fixed on Tuesday, 29th, and, if Mrs. C. had thought of Monday, she would be so kind as to take Wednesday, 30th. So all was amicably agreed; there would be no clashing, which would be such a pity and would spoil both balls; and the cards were duly issued. Directly afterwards, as if moved by some occult and fiendish impulse, the Duchess of D—— pounced on Monday, 28th, for a Royal Ball at D—— House, or, worse still because more perilously tempting, for a "very small dance," to which all the nicest young men would go, and where they would stay till three. In the face of such mortifications as these, the emulous hospitalities of the aspiring Distiller were of no account; for the "nice men" would either disregard them, or, having looked in for half-an-hour, would come on to spend the night at the houses where they felt themselves at home.The hero of 1880, if only he was well connected, well mannered, and sufficiently well known, might fairly reckon on dining six nights out of the seven at a host's expense. Indeed, if he was at all popular, he could safely afford to decline the invitation which old Mr. Wellbore issued six weeks in advance and reserve himself for a livelier meal at shorter notice. Not so to-day. Our young friend, if he has a constitutional objection to paying for his own dinner, must take what he can get in the way of invitations, and not be too particular about the cook or the company. Here the cause of change is not decrease of wealth. As long as there is a balance at the bank, and even when there is none, people will dine; and dinner-giving is the last form of hospitality which Society will let die. But nowadays dinners are made ancillary to Bridge. If our friend cannot afford to lose £50 in an evening he will not be asked to dine at a house which reckons itself as belonging to "the Mode"; or if, for old acquaintance' sake, he is allowed to find a place at the dinner-table, he is compelled to sit all the evening by the least attractive daughter of the house, or to listen to some fogey, too fossilized for Bridge, discoursing on the iniquities of Mr. Birrell's Bill. "Tobacco," said Lord Beaconsfield, "is the Tomb of Love." If he were with us now, he would pronounce that Bridge is the Extinguisher of Hospitality.Yet once again I note a startling discrepancybetween the Season as it was and the Season as it is. Then a young man who wanted air and exercise in the afternoon played tennis at Lord's, or skated at Prince's, or took a gallop in Richmond Park, or, if he was very adventurous and up-to-date, sped out to Hampton Court or Windsor on a bone-shaking bicycle six feet high. All these recreations are possible to him to-day; but all have yielded to motoring. Dressed in the most unbecoming of all known costumes, his expressive eyes concealed by goggles, and his graceful proportions swathed in oilskin, he urges his mad career to Brighton or Stratford or Salisbury Plain. No doubt he has the most fascinating companions in the world, for girls are enthusiastic motorists; but I fancy that Edwin and Angelina presented a more attractive appearance when, neatly dressed and beautifully mounted, they rode in the cool of the evening along the shady side of Rotten Row.However, I am a kind of social "Old Mortality" rummaging among the tombs of what has been and can be no more, and I fancy that Old Mortality's opinions on youth and beauty would have been justly disregarded.XITHE SINS OF SOCIETYIn the year 1870 a flame of religious zeal was suddenly kindled in the West End of London. In that year the Rev. George Howard Wilkinson (now Bishop of St. Andrews) was appointed Vicar of St. Peter's, Eaton Square. The church in the Belgravian district was as dry as tinder; it caught fire from Mr. Wilkinson's fervour, and the fire soon became a conflagration. This is Matthew Arnold's description of the great preacher at the height of his power: "He was so evidently sincere, more than sincere, burnt up with sorrow, that he carried every one with him, and half the church was in tears. I do not much believe in good being done by a man unless he can givelight, and Wilkinson's fire is very turbid; but his power of heating, penetrating, and agitating is extraordinary." This description belongs to the year 1872, but it might have been written with equal truth at any date between 1870 and 1883. In all my experience of preaching (which is long, wide, and varied) I have never seen a congregation dominated by its minister so absolutely as thecongregation of St. Peter's was dominated by Mr. Wilkinson. I say "congregation" advisedly, for I should think that at least half the seatholders belonged to other parishes. The smartest carriages in London blocked the approach to the church. The great dames of Grosvenor Square and Carlton House Terrace rubbed shoulders with the opulent inhabitants of Tyburnia and South Kensington, Cabinet Ministers fought for places in the gallery, and M.P.'s were no more accounted of than silver in the days of Solomon.And this was not a mere assemblage of hearers. The congregation of St. Peter's were pre-eminently givers. £4000 a year was the regular product of the alms-bags, let alone the innumerable sums sent privately to the Vicar. "I want a thousand pounds." This simple but emphatic statement from the pulpit one Sunday was succeeded on the following Sunday by the quiet announcement, "I have got a thousand pounds." What was the secret of this attraction? It was entirely personal. It did not in the least depend on theological bias. Mr. Wilkinson belonged to no party. He had begun life as an Evangelical, and he retained the unction and fervour which were characteristic of that school at its best; but he was feeling his way towards a higher churchmanship, and had discarded most of his earlier shibboleths. The fabric was frankly hideous, and the well-meant attempts to make it look less like a barn and more like achurch only resulted in something between a mosque and a synagogue. There was no ritualism. The music was too elaborate for the choir, and the curates were feeble beyond all description. The Vicar was everything; and even he had none of the gifts which are commonly supposed to make a Popular Preacher. He was not the least flummery or flowery. He was reserved and dignified in manner, and his language was quite unadorned. His voice was a monotonous moan, occasionally rising into a howl. He was conspicuously free from the tendency to prophesy smooth things, and he even seemed to take a delight in rubbing the pungent lotion of his spiritual satire into the sore places of the hearers' conscience. If Jeremiah had prophesied in a surplice, he would have been like the Prophet of Belgravia; and as for Savonarola, his sermon, as paraphrased in chapter xxiv. of "Romola," might have been delivered, with scarcely a word altered, from the pulpit of St. Peter's.And here we touch the pith and core of Mr. Wilkinson's preaching. He rebuked the Sins of Society as no one had ventured to rebuke them since the days of Whitefield and the Wesleys. The Tractarian Movement, so heart-searching, so conscience-stirring at Oxford, had succumbed in the fashionable parts of London to the influences which surrounded it, and had degenerated into a sort of easy-going ceremonialism—partly antiquarian,partly worldly, and wholly ineffective for spiritual revival or moral reformation. Into this Dead Sea of lethargy and formalism Mr. Wilkinson burst like a gunboat. He scattered his fire left and right, aimed high and aimed low, blazed and bombarded without fear or favour; sent some crafts to the bottom, set fire to others, and covered the sea with wreckage. In less metaphorical language, he rebuked the sins of all and sundry, from Duchesses to scullery-maids, Premiers to pageboys, octogenarian rakes to damsels in their teens. Then, as now, Society loved to be scolded, and the more Mr. Wilkinson thundered the more it crowded to his feet. "Pay your bills." "Get up when you are called." "Don't stay till three at a ball and then say that you are too delicate for early services." "Eat one dinner a day instead of three, and try to earn that one." "Give up champagne for the season, and what you save on your wine-merchant's bill send to the Mission Field." "You are sixty-five years old and have not been confirmed. Never too late to mend. Join a Confirmation Class at once, and try to remedy, by good example now, all the harm you have done your servants or your neighbours by fifty years' indifference." "Sell that diamond cross which you carry with you into the sin-polluted atmosphere of the Opera, give the proceeds to feed the poor, and wear the only real cross—the cross of self-discipline and self-denial."These are echoes—faint, indeed, but not, I think, unfaithful—of thirty years ago, and they have suddenly been awoke from their long slumber by the sermons which Father Vaughan has just been preaching at the Jesuits' Church in Farm Street, Mayfair. The good Father, exalting his own church, perhaps a little unduly, at the expense of the Anglican churches in the district, observed complacently that "Farm Street, in spite of its extension, was all too small" for its congregation. For my own part, I do not belong to that fold, and I never wander to strange churches for the pleasure of having my ears tickled; so I only know Father Vaughan's utterances as they reach me through the newspapers. A report in the third person always tends to enfeeble rhetoric; but, in spite of that hindrance, Father Vaughan's style seems to lack nothing in the way of emphasis or directness. Here is a fragment of his sermon preached on Sunday the 10th of June 1906:—"It was no easy task for the votaries of pleasure when Sunday came round to all of a sudden forget their class distinctions, their privileged sets, their social successes, their worldly goods, and to remember that they were going into the presence of Him before whom man and woman were not what they happened to have, but what they happened to be—that the debutante beauty might be before God less than her maid who waited up half the night for her, nay, less than the meanest scullery-maidbelow stairs; while the millionaire with means to buy up whole countries might be in God's sight far less pleasing and very much more guilty than the lowest groom in his stable yard."Not less vigorous was the allocution of June 17."If Dives, who was buried in Hell, were to revisit the earth he would most surely have theentréeto London's smartest set to-day. He would be literally pelted with invitations. And why not? Dives, so well groomed and turned out, with such a well-lined larder and so well-stocked a cellar, would be the very ideal host to cultivate. He would 'do you so well,' you would meet the 'right people at his place,' and you could always bring your 'latest friend.' Besides, what a good time one would have at his house-parties, where there would be no fear of being bored or dull!"[5]And yet again:—"It was well when the winning-card fell into their hands, for then there was just a chance of some dressmaker or tradesman being paid something on account before becoming bankrupt. With such examples of the misuse of wealth before their eyes, it was a wonder there were not more Socialists than there actually were."All the memories of my youth have been revived by Father Vaughan. Instead of 1906, 1876; instead of the Gothic gloom of FarmStreet, the tawdry glare of St. Peter's, Eaton Square; instead of a Jesuit Father in the pulpit, a vigorous Protestant who renounces the Pope and all his works and glories in the Anglicanism of the Church of England. Grant those differences, which after all are more incidental than essential, and the sermons exactly reproduce those stirring days when the present Bishop of St. Andrews "shook the arsenal" of fashion, "thundered over" London, and achieved, as his admirers said, the supreme distinction of spoiling the London Season.I am convinced that the Higher Critics of a later age, collating the Wilkinsonian tradition with such fragments as remain of Father Vaughan's discourses, will come to the conclusion that "Wilkinson" never existed (except in Wordsworth's ode to the Spade), but was a kind of heroic figure conceived by a much later generation, which had quivered under the rhetoric of a real person or persons called Vaughan; and the opinion of the learned will be sharply divided on such questions as whether Vaughan was one or many; if one, whether he was a Priest, a Cardinal, a Head Master, or an Independent Minister; or whether he was all four at different stages of his career.XIIOXFORD"Once, my dear—but the world was young then—Magdalen elms and Trinity limes,—Lissom the oars and backs that swung then,Eight good men in the good old times—Careless we and the chorus flung then.Under St. Mary's chimes!"Still on her spire the pigeons hover;Still by her gateway flits the gown;Ah, but her secret? You, young lover,Drumming her old ones forth from town,Know you the secret none discover?Tell it—whenyougo down."What Matthew Arnold did for the interpretation of Oxford through the medium of prose, that Mr. Quiller-Couch has done through the medium of verse. In the poem from which I have just quoted two stanzas he conveys, as no one else has ever conveyed it in poetry, the tender and elusive charm of that incomparable place."Know you her secret none can utter—Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown?"It is a hard question, and susceptible of some veryprosaic and therefore inappropriate answers. The true answer can, I think, only be given by those for whom Oxford lies, half hid, in the enchanted past: "Tell it—whenyougo down."Some parts of the spell which Oxford exercises on those who are subjected to her influence are in no sense secret. We perceive them from the day when we first set foot within her precincts, and the sense of them abides with us for ever."If less insensible than sodden clayIn a sea-river's bed at ebb of tide,"all sons of Oxford must realize her material beauty, her historical pre-eminence, her contribution to thought and culture, her influence on the religious life of England."Ah, but her secret? You, young lover."There is nothing secret about all this; it is palpable and manifest; and yet it does not exhaust the spell. Something there is that remains undiscovered, or at best half-discovered—felt and guessed at, but not clearly apprehended—until we have passed away from the "dreaming spires"—the cloisters and the gardens and the river—to that sterner life for which these mysterious enchantments have been preparing us."Know you the secret none discover?"If you do, that is proof that time has done its work and has brought to the test of practical result the influences which were shaping your mind and,still more potently, your heart, between eighteen and twenty-two. What that "secret" is, let an unworthy son of Oxford try to tell.To begin with a negative, it is not the secret of Nirvana. There are misguided critics abroad in the land who seem to assume that life lived easily in a beautiful place, amid a society which includes all knowledge in its comprehensive survey, and far remote from the human tragedy of poverty and toil and pain, must necessarily be calm. And so, as regards the actual work and warfare of mankind, it may be. The bitter cry of starving Poplar does not very readily penetrate to the well-spread table of an Oxford common-room. In a laburnum-clad villa in the Parks we can afford to reason very temperately about life in cities where five families camp in one room. But when we leave the actualities of life and come to the region of thought and opinion, all the pent energy of Oxford seethes and stirs. The Hebrew word for "Prophet" comes, I believe, from a root which signifies to bubble like water on the flames; and in this fervency of thought and feeling Oxford is characteristically prophetic. It is a tradition that in some year of the passion-torn 'forties the subject for the Newdigate Prize Poem was Cromwell, whereas the subject for the corresponding poem at Cambridge was Plato. In that selection Oxford was true to herself. For a century at least (even if we leave out of sight her earlier convulsions) shehas been the battle-field of contending sects. Her air has resounded with party-cries, and the dead bodies of the controversially slain have lain thick in her streets. All the opposing forces of Church and State, of theology and politics, of philosophy and science, of literary and social and economic theory, have contended for mastery in the place which Matthew Arnold, with rare irony, described as "so unruffled by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!" Every succeeding generation of Oxford men has borne its part in these ever-recurring strifes. To hold aloof from them would have been poltroonery. Passionately convinced (at twenty) that we had sworn ourselves for life to each cause which we espoused, we have pleaded and planned and denounced and persuaded; have struck the shrewdest blows which our strength could compass, and devised the most dangerous pitfalls which wit could suggest. Nothing came of it all, and nothing could come, except the ruin of our appointed studies and the resulting dislocation of all subsequent life. But we were obeying the irresistible impulse of the time and the place in which our lot was cast, and we were ready to risk our all upon the venture."Never we wince, though none deplore us,We who go reaping that we sowed;Cities at cockcrow wake before us—Hey, for the lilt of the London road!One look back, and a rousing chorus!Never a palinode!"It is when we have finally sung that chorus and have travelled a few miles upon that road, that we learn the secret which we never discovered while as yet Oxford held us in the thick of the fight. We thought then that we were the most desperate partizans; we asked no quarter, and gave none; pushed our argumentative victories to their uttermost consequences, and made short work of a fallen foe. But, when all the old battle-cries have died out of our ears, we begin to perceive humaner voices. All at once we realize that a great part of our old contentions was only sound and fury and self-deception, and that, though the causes for which we strove may have been absolutely right, our opponents were not necessarily villains. In a word, we have learnt the Secret of Oxford. All the time that we were fighting and fuming, the higher and subtler influences of the place were moulding us, unconscious though we were, to a more gracious ideal. We had really learnt to distinguish between intellectual error and moral obliquity. We could differ from another on every point of the political and theological compass, and yet in our hearts acknowledge him to be the best of all good fellows. Without surrendering a single conviction, we came to see the virtue of so stating our beliefs as to persuade and propitiate, instead of offending and alienating. We had attained to that temper which, in the sphere of thought and opinion,is analogous to the crowning virtue of Christian charity."Tell it—whenyougo down."Lately it has been my privilege to address a considerable gathering of Oxford undergraduates, all keenly alive to the interests and controversies of the present hour, all devotedly loyal to the tradition of Oxford as each understood it, and all with their eyes eagerly fixed on "the wistful limit of the world." With such an audience it was inevitable to insist on the graces and benedictions which Oxford can confer, and to dwell on Mr. Gladstone's dogma that to call a man a "typically Oxford man" is to bestow the highest possible praise.But this was not all. Something more remained to be said. It was for a speaker who had travelled for thirty years on "the London road" to state as plainly as he could his own deepest obligation to the place which had decided the course and complexion of his life. And, when it was difficult to express that obligation in the pedestrian prose of an after-dinner speech, he turned for succour to the poet who sang of "the secret none discover." Wherever philosophical insight is combined with literary genius and personal charm, one says instinctively, "That man is, or ought to be, an Oxford man." Chiefest among the great names which Oxford ought to claim but cannot is the name of Edmund Burke;and the "Secret" on which we have been discoursing seems to be conveyed with luminous precision in his description of the ideal character: "It is our business ... to bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots as not to forget we are gentlemen; to cultivate friendships and to incur enmities; to have both strong, but both selected—in the one to be placable, in the other immovable." Whoso has attained to that ideal has learnt the "Secret" of Oxford.XIIISCHOOLS FOR SHEPHERDS"The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed."Why not? Because the Shepherds are so imperfectly trained for their business. This, at any rate, is the testimony of a Canon (sometime Examining Chaplain to a Bishop) who at the Diocesan Conference at Ely the other day declared that the clergy were "not qualified to provide instruction in Church Doctrine for the laity because they were not properly trained"; and further testified that "Nonconformist Ministers were much better trained" than the English Clergy. This testimony from a superior Shepherd is rather startling for the Sheep, and it suggests some interesting comparisons. It is, I take it, unquestionable that Nonconformist ministers and Roman Catholic priests alike have much more of a technical education than is thought necessary for their Anglican brothers. They are, so to say, caught early, and their studies from seventeen or eighteen onwards are directed steadily towards their appointed work in life. A Roman Seminarist learns his Latin and Greek as subsidiary to higherstudies; he spends, I believe, two years in Philosophy and four in Theology, and is harassed by incessant examinations. The training of the youth who aspires to the Nonconformist ministry is of much the same kind. "Moral Theology," in other words the Science of the Confessional, he naturally does not learn; but, on the other hand, he is sedulously trained for the work of public speaking and preaching. "If you can't preach," said Spurgeon to his students at Stockwell, "it is a clear proof that God doesn't mean you to be a preacher, and you must choose some other occupation."Vastly different is the training of the English Curate. Private School, Public School, and University: cricket, football, rowing: elementary Greek and Latin, and a smattering of Law or History—these constitute his "atmosphere," his moral and mental discipline, between the ages of ten and twenty-three. Even more remarkable is his theological equipment. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he knows absolutely nothing about the Church of which he is to be a minister, her doctrines, history, or practical system. He has been enveloped from his youth up by a hazy atmosphere of Undogmatic Religion. I well remember that an Undergraduate friend of mine, who came to Oxford from Dr. Temple's Sixth Form at Rugby, declined to believe that there are two Sacraments. That there was a religiousceremony called "The Sacrament," for which some people stayed after the ordinary service, he was well aware, as also that infants were ceremonially sprinkled; but that this latter ceremony was a Sacrament he could not be induced to believe. During his last year at Oxford he informed himself better on this and some similar topics, and a year afterwards was preaching, with great acceptance, to a fashionable congregation. From what I knew of my friend's theological attainments, I should imagine that the Bishop's Examination could not have been a very terrifying process; but forty years earlier it must have been even less formidable. The Hon. and Rev. George Spencer (uncle of the present Lord Spencer) was destined from an early age for the Family Living in Northamptonshire. He hunted and shot, and danced, and travelled on the Continent, and held a commission in the Yeomanry. After two years at Trinity College, Cambridge, he took a "Nobleman's Degree," and, when he neared the canonical age of twenty-three, he wrote to the Bishop of Peterborough's Examining Chaplain offering himself for Ordination and asking advice as to his preparation. The examiner—ah, would that there were more like him!—wrote back:—"It is impossible that I should ever entertain any idea of subjecting a gentleman with whose talents and good qualities I am so well acquainted as I am with yours to any examination except asa matter of form, for which a verse in the Greek Testament and an Article of the Church of England returned into Latin will be amply sufficient."This reassuring letter was written on the 12th of October 1822, and on the 22nd of December next ensuing George Spencer was ordained Deacon and a year later Priest. "On the evening before the ordination, whilst the Bishop and various clergymen and their ladies and the candidates amused themselves with a rubber of whist, Mr. Spencer refused to play." And the refusal was considered, as perhaps it was, noteworthy.The Movement which issued from Oxford in 1833 introduced some improvement into the method of conducting ordinations, as into other departments of the Church's work. The examination became, though not yet very serious, at least a little less farcical, and some attempt was made in charges and sermons to urge upon the candidates the gravity of what they were undertaking. But, according to the late Bishop Woodford, "the evenings, during which they were left to themselves, became evenings of social enjoyment, if not of boisterous merriment, in which the features of an old college supper-party were reproduced, rather than intervals of solemn thought and retirement."Bishop Samuel Wilberforce raised the standard of what was expected in the way of Scriptural and theological knowledge; he made the examinationa reality; he laid special stress on sermon-writing; and he made the Ember Week a season of spiritual retirement in which men about to take the most decisive step in life might be brought face to face with the responsibilities involved in their decision. The example set by Wilberforce was followed, sooner or later, by every bishop on the bench; the requirements have been raised, and the system has been developed and improved; but the credit of initiation belongs to that epoch-making episcopate, which began in 1845 and ended, through a false step made by a horse on the Surrey Downs, on the 19th of July 1873.It soon became apparent to those who had the spiritual interests of the Church at heart that something more than twelve months' book-work and a week of religious retirement was required to wean the ordinary B.A. from the puerilities—if nothing worse—of his Undergraduate life, and to equip him for a life of Pastorship and Teachership. The sense of this need gave rise to the creation of Theological Colleges, where a man who looked forward to Holy Orders might, after taking his ordinary degree at Oxford or Cambridge, apply himself to the studies more specially necessary for his chosen work, and—even more important still—might acquire the habits of methodical and self-disciplined life. The idea took shape in such foundations as the Theological Colleges of Wells, Cuddesdon, Sarum, and Ely, theScholæ Cancellariiat Lincoln, and the Clergy School at Leeds. Fighting their way through all manner of strange misrepresentations about Monasticism and Mediævalism, they have in the course of years attained to recognition, popularity, and apparent stability. The bishops patronize them warmly, and incumbents who desire curates not wholly ignorant of their craft are increasingly unwilling to engage one who has not passed through a Theological College. That the broad result of the training given in these seminaries is a general increase in clerical efficiency I cannot doubt, but perhaps a layman may be permitted to point out some curious gaps and lapses in that training which go some way towards making clergymen less esteemed, and therefore less influential, than they ought to be.1. The Clergy are not taught to be courteous. If they are courteous by nature and habit, well and good; but a rough Undergraduate, destitute of sympathy and tact and ignorant of social usage, passes through a Theological College and comes out as rough as he entered it. A Bear in Holy Orders is as destructive as a Bull in a China Shop.2. The Clergy are not taught to manage money; they muddle their public accounts; they beg money for one object and use it for another; they seldom acknowledge what they receive by post; and they have absolutely no notion of cutting their coat according to their cloth. "Spend andbeg, and the money will come from somewhere" is their simple and sufficient creed.3. The Clergy are not taught business. They have not the faintest notion of conducting a public meeting. They lose their way in the agenda-paper of the most insignificant committee. They break appointments at their will and pleasure. They seldom answer letters, and are frankly astonished when their correspondents are annoyed.4. The Clergy are not taught the Science of Citizenship. Outside their strictly professional studies (and, in some cases, the records of athleticism) they are the most ignorant set of young men in the world. They work hard and play hard, but they never read. They know nothing of books, nothing of history, nothing of the Constitution under which they live, of the principles and records of political parties, of the need for social reform or the means of securing it. They have a vague but clinging notion that Radicals are Infidels, and that Dissenters, if they got their deserts, would have their heads punched.Sixty years ago an Italian critic said that, in spite of all their defects, the English clergy were "Un clero colto e civile." Could as much be said to-day?XIVPILGRIMAGESI use the word in something wider than Chaucer's sense, and yet in a sense not wholly different from his. For, though we no longer make an annual visit to the Shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, still we all feel bound, at least once a year, to go somewhere and do something quite out of our normal course. Perhaps, like Chaucer's friends, we "long" to do this in April, but the claims of business are generally too strong for us; so we have to content ourselves with admiring the peeps of greenery which begin to invade the soot of our urban gardens, and, if we are of a cultured habit, we can always quote Browning's Thrush or strain the kalendar so as to admit Wordsworth's Daffodils.This notion of a yearly Pilgrimage as a necessity of rightly-ordered life seems to have fallen into a long abeyance. "Dan Chaucer" (for I love to be on easy terms with great men) described the social customs of the fourteenth century, and then the Pilgrimage seems to have been an established institution: "Tom Hughes" described those ofthe eighteenth, and this is what, writing in 1862, he says about the annual Pilgrimages of his own time:—"I have been credibly informed, and am inclined to believe, that the various Boards of Directors of Railway Companies agreed together some ten years back to buy up the learned profession of Medicine, body and soul. To this end they set apart several millions of money, which they continually distribute judiciously among the Doctors, stipulating only this one thing—that they shall prescribe change of air to every patient who can pay, or borrow money to pay, a railway fare, and see their prescription carried out. If it be not for this, why is it that none of us can be well at home for a year together? It wasn't so twenty years ago—not a bit of it. The Browns did not go out of the county once in five years."The Browns, as we all know, stood in Mr. Hughes's vocabulary for the Upper Middle Class of England—the class to which the clergy, the smaller squires, and the professional men belong; the class which in Chaucer's time contained the "Man of Lawe," the "Marchande," the "Franklyne," and the "Doctore of Phisyke"; and, although Mr. Hughes, who ought to know, says that in the earlier part of Queen Victoria's reign they were a stay-at-home class, they are now the most regular and the most zealous of Pilgrims. It was the majestic misfortune of the Duke in"Lothair" to have so many houses that he had no home. People so circumstanced do not need to go on Pilgrimages. After the autumn in a Scotch Castle, the winter in a country house in the Midlands, the spring in another in the Southern Counties, and the season in Grosvenor Square, people are glad of a little rest, and seek it in some "proud alcove" on the Thames or a sea-girt villa at Cowes. Unless their livers drive them to Carlsbad or their hearts to Nauheim, they do not travel, but display what Lord Beaconsfield called "the sustained splendour of their stately lives" in the many mansions which, in the aggregate, represent to them the idea of Home. I might perhaps on another occasion sketch the Grand Tour of Europe, on which, for educational purposes, the Earl of Fitzurse used to send his eldest son, young Lord Cubley; compressed, with his tutor and doctor, into a travelling-carriage, with a valet and a courier in the rumble. The Duke of Argyll's Autobiography has just told us what this kind of Pilgrimage was like; but to-day I am dealing with the present rather than the past.It is the people with one house who go on Pilgrimages nowadays—the impoverished squire, the smoke-dried clergyman, the exhausted merchant, the harried editor. To these must be added all the inhabitants, male and female, of Lodging-land and Flat-land,—all "the dim, common populations" of Stuccovia and Suburbia. Thereare mysterious laws of association which connect classes with localities. Tradesmen love Margate; to clerks Scarborough is dear. The Semitic financier has long claimed Brighton for his own. Costermongers go hop-picking in Kent; artizans disport themselves on the nigger-haunted pier of Southend. Governed by some mysterious law of their being, schoolmasters make straight for the Alps. There they live the strenuous life and brave the perilous ascent; climb and puff and pant all day; rush in, very untidy and not very clean, totable d'hôte; and season their meal with the "shop" of St. Winifred's or the gay banter of Rosslyn Common-room. It is agreeable to watch the forced cordiality, the thin tutorial humour, with which they greet some quite irresponsive pupil who happens to have strayed into the same hotel; and I have often had occasion to admire the precocious dexterity with which the pupil extricates himself from this dreaded companionship. Of Mr. Gladstone it was said by his detractors that he had something of the Schoolmaster in his composition; and this trait was aptly illustrated when, during the summer holidays some fifty years ago, he met the late Duchess of Abercorn in a country house accompanied by her schoolboy son, Lord George Hamilton. Not many mornings had elapsed before Mr. Gladstone said to the boy's mother, "Duchess, don't you think it a pity that your son should spend his holidays in entire idleness?I should be happy to give him an hour's Homer every morning." The offer was accepted, and the foundation of Lord George's lifelong hostility to the Liberal leader was securely laid. It is the nervous dread of some such awful possibility which supplies wings to the boy's feet and lies to his tongue when he encounters Dr. Grimstone or Basil Warde in a Swiss hotel.While the Schoolmaster limits his aspirations to the Alps, the Oxford or Cambridge Don, having a longer vacation at his command, takes a more extended view, and urges his adventurous Pilgrimage along roads less trite. A few years ago an Oxford Don resolved to strike out what was then a quite new line, and spend his Long Vacation in Portugal. Conscious of insufficient acquaintance with the Portuguese language, he repaired to Mr. Parker's excellent shop in the Turl and enquired for a Portuguese Phrase-book. After some research, that never-failing bookseller produced "The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English." The book had an instant and a deserved success. The preface sets forth that "a choice of familiar dialogues, clean of gallicisms and despoiled phrases, it was missing yet to studious Portuguese and Brazilian youth; and also to persons of other nations that wish to know the Portuguese language." To supply this felt want Pedro Carolino compiled his hand-book for "the acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the Youth,at which we dedicate him particularly." Among those studious persons was our Pilgrim-Don, who naturally turned in the first instance to a dialogue headed"FOR TO TRAVELWhen do you start?As soon as I shall have to finish a business at Cadiz.Have you already arrested a coach?Yes, sir, and very cheap.Have you great deal of effects?Two trunks and one portmanteau.You may prepare all for to-morrow. We shall start at the coolness.The way, is it good?Very good.At which inn shall stop us?In that of the Sun, it is the best. The account mount is little. The supper, the bed, and the breakfast shall get up at thirty franks.That seems to me a little dear."The next dialogue follows in the natural order:—"FOR TO BREAKFASTJohn, bring us some thing for to breakfast.Yes, sir; there is some sausages and some meat pies. Will you that I bring the ham?Yes, bring him, we will cut a steak.Put an nappe cloth upon this table.Give us some plates, any knifes, and some forks, rinse the glasses.I have eaten with satisfaction some pudding, sausages, and some ham. I shall take some tea.Still a not her cup?I thank you it is enough."Breakfast over, the traveller engages a guide and starts out"FOR TO SEE THE TOWNWe won't to see all that is it remarquable here.Come with me, if you please. I shall not folget nothing what can to merit your attention. Here we are near to cathedraly. Will you come in there?We will first go to see him in oudside, after we shall go in there for to look the interior."A day of sight-seeing concludes happily with the ever-welcome dialogue—"FOR TO DINEGive us a rice soup.What wine do you like best?Bourgogne wine.Give us some beef and potatoes, a beefsteak to the English.What you shall take for dessert?Give us some Hollande cheese and some prunes.I will take a glass of brandy at the cherries.Gentlemen, don't forget the waiter."Parsimony is a bond which makes the whole world kin, and it is interesting to find embedded in 182 closely-printed pages of "despoiled phrases" two such characteristic specimens of sound English as "That seems to me a little dear" and "Don't forget the waiter."

XTHE SEASON AS IT ISThat delicate critic, the late Mr. William Cory, observes in one of his letters that Virgil's"Sunt lacrymæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt"has its modern equivalent in Wordsworth's"Men are we, and must grieve when even the shadeOf that which once was great is passed away."The full luxury of that grief is reserved for those who, a decade hence, shall moralize on "the London Season," for the thing which now we so describe will then have utterly perished, and its name will only arouse a tender and regretful emotion. Even now we have seen its glories fade, and soon it will have shared the fate of those Venetian splendours which Wordsworth mourned. But in the meantime it still exists, though in a vastly different form from that which it wore in mid-Victorian years. Just now I was describing some of the changes which have occurred since the distant days when Bulwer-Lytton and Lord Beaconsfield described London in May; and, following humbly in their wake, I endeavoured todepict it as it was when I had my part in it. But change only yields place to change. Society, like the individuals who compose it, passes onward in perpetual vicissitude. As Shelley says, "Naught may endure but mutability." So the London Season of 1906 differs as notably from the Season of 1880 as the Season of 1880 from that of 1846. Let me catalogue some of the changes and try to account for them. In the first place, the Season is much less exactly circumscribed by dates. In days gone by, it began with the Opening of Parliament, which was always about the 7th of February, and it lasted, with its regular intermissions for Easter and Whitsuntide, till the last week of July. Then Society transported itself in turn to Goodwood, to Cowes, and to a German watering-place or a Scotch moor, according to its physical condition, and it was darkly rumoured that, if people found themselves compelled by domestic or financial reasons to remain in London during August, they sought to escape detection by keeping the windows fronting the street closely shuttered, and lived in their back rooms in unbroken contemplation of the leads and the mews. If you chanced to meet a man in Piccadilly in September, you might be sure that he would be wearing country clothes and would assure you that he was only "passing through" between Doncaster and Scotland. Nowadays the Season has no particular limits. London is nearly as full in Decemberas it is in May. Dinners and plays and suppers at restaurants are as frequent, and, barring the fogs, as bright, at Christmas as at Midsummer. Even in September Clubland is not deserted; and there are people bold enough to defy the world by returning from their summer exodus as early as October. The reason for the change, as for many others like it, is the reduction of territorial incomes. 1880 may be taken as, roughly, the last of the good years for agriculture. The incessant rains of 1879 had even then begun to tell their tale. Tenants were asking for big reductions, and farms hitherto eagerly sought were becoming unlettable. I know a landowner on a great scale who, a year or two later, only pocketed 10 per cent. of his income from land, whereas five years before he would have thought an abatement of 10 per cent. disastrous. All this has told increasingly on social life, for people found themselves unable to keep both a country house and a London house going at the same time, and, being driven to choose between the two, often decided to let the country house and its shooting and make London their headquarters for the whole year. So, by degrees, autumn faded imperceptibly into winter, winter into spring, and spring into summer. Each season in its turn found people dwelling peaceably in their urban habitations, entertaining and being entertained; and so "theSeason" lost its sharp edges. The meeting of Parliament broughtno perceptible change in the aspect of the town. "High Midsummer Pomps" were no longer so "high" as in former years, but,per contra, there was much more gaiety in the autumn and winter and early spring.Another cause which has contributed to the effacement of the ancient time-marks is that the Court tends to disregard them. Under the present reign, Windsor Castle has become as much a social centre as Buckingham Palace. There are banquets in St. George's Hall in December, as well as garden-parties on the the Slopes in June; and so, under the action of Royal influence, the social seasons melt into one another, like the hues of the prism. Then, again, the practice of the "Weekend," imported from Lancashire and sanctioned by Westminster, helps to denude the town in summer; for the "end" tends naturally to prolong itself till it overlaps the beginning, and Friday-to-Tuesday parties, treading on the heels of Whitsuntide and to be followed in quick succession by Ascot, make mish-mash of what was aforetime "an entire and perfect chrysolite"—a complete and continuous whole.In describing my hero of 1880 as he surveyed his evening's amusements and chose the most rewarding, I took for granted that he had at least three balls to choose from. Nowadays he is lucky if he has one. Here again, and conspicuously, agricultural depression has made itsmark. In the years between 1870 and 1880, during an unbroken spell of good trade and good harvests, rich people struggled with one another for a vacant night on which to entertain their friends. For example, Lady A. had just brought out a daughter, and wished to give a ball for her benefit. Say that she set her affections on Monday the 28th of May. Before she issued her cards she took counsel with all her friends, for in those days ball-giving mothers were a sort of Limited Company, and all knew one another. She found that Mrs. B. had mentally fixed on Tuesday, 29th, and, if Mrs. C. had thought of Monday, she would be so kind as to take Wednesday, 30th. So all was amicably agreed; there would be no clashing, which would be such a pity and would spoil both balls; and the cards were duly issued. Directly afterwards, as if moved by some occult and fiendish impulse, the Duchess of D—— pounced on Monday, 28th, for a Royal Ball at D—— House, or, worse still because more perilously tempting, for a "very small dance," to which all the nicest young men would go, and where they would stay till three. In the face of such mortifications as these, the emulous hospitalities of the aspiring Distiller were of no account; for the "nice men" would either disregard them, or, having looked in for half-an-hour, would come on to spend the night at the houses where they felt themselves at home.The hero of 1880, if only he was well connected, well mannered, and sufficiently well known, might fairly reckon on dining six nights out of the seven at a host's expense. Indeed, if he was at all popular, he could safely afford to decline the invitation which old Mr. Wellbore issued six weeks in advance and reserve himself for a livelier meal at shorter notice. Not so to-day. Our young friend, if he has a constitutional objection to paying for his own dinner, must take what he can get in the way of invitations, and not be too particular about the cook or the company. Here the cause of change is not decrease of wealth. As long as there is a balance at the bank, and even when there is none, people will dine; and dinner-giving is the last form of hospitality which Society will let die. But nowadays dinners are made ancillary to Bridge. If our friend cannot afford to lose £50 in an evening he will not be asked to dine at a house which reckons itself as belonging to "the Mode"; or if, for old acquaintance' sake, he is allowed to find a place at the dinner-table, he is compelled to sit all the evening by the least attractive daughter of the house, or to listen to some fogey, too fossilized for Bridge, discoursing on the iniquities of Mr. Birrell's Bill. "Tobacco," said Lord Beaconsfield, "is the Tomb of Love." If he were with us now, he would pronounce that Bridge is the Extinguisher of Hospitality.Yet once again I note a startling discrepancybetween the Season as it was and the Season as it is. Then a young man who wanted air and exercise in the afternoon played tennis at Lord's, or skated at Prince's, or took a gallop in Richmond Park, or, if he was very adventurous and up-to-date, sped out to Hampton Court or Windsor on a bone-shaking bicycle six feet high. All these recreations are possible to him to-day; but all have yielded to motoring. Dressed in the most unbecoming of all known costumes, his expressive eyes concealed by goggles, and his graceful proportions swathed in oilskin, he urges his mad career to Brighton or Stratford or Salisbury Plain. No doubt he has the most fascinating companions in the world, for girls are enthusiastic motorists; but I fancy that Edwin and Angelina presented a more attractive appearance when, neatly dressed and beautifully mounted, they rode in the cool of the evening along the shady side of Rotten Row.However, I am a kind of social "Old Mortality" rummaging among the tombs of what has been and can be no more, and I fancy that Old Mortality's opinions on youth and beauty would have been justly disregarded.

THE SEASON AS IT IS

That delicate critic, the late Mr. William Cory, observes in one of his letters that Virgil's

"Sunt lacrymæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt"

has its modern equivalent in Wordsworth's

"Men are we, and must grieve when even the shadeOf that which once was great is passed away."

The full luxury of that grief is reserved for those who, a decade hence, shall moralize on "the London Season," for the thing which now we so describe will then have utterly perished, and its name will only arouse a tender and regretful emotion. Even now we have seen its glories fade, and soon it will have shared the fate of those Venetian splendours which Wordsworth mourned. But in the meantime it still exists, though in a vastly different form from that which it wore in mid-Victorian years. Just now I was describing some of the changes which have occurred since the distant days when Bulwer-Lytton and Lord Beaconsfield described London in May; and, following humbly in their wake, I endeavoured todepict it as it was when I had my part in it. But change only yields place to change. Society, like the individuals who compose it, passes onward in perpetual vicissitude. As Shelley says, "Naught may endure but mutability." So the London Season of 1906 differs as notably from the Season of 1880 as the Season of 1880 from that of 1846. Let me catalogue some of the changes and try to account for them. In the first place, the Season is much less exactly circumscribed by dates. In days gone by, it began with the Opening of Parliament, which was always about the 7th of February, and it lasted, with its regular intermissions for Easter and Whitsuntide, till the last week of July. Then Society transported itself in turn to Goodwood, to Cowes, and to a German watering-place or a Scotch moor, according to its physical condition, and it was darkly rumoured that, if people found themselves compelled by domestic or financial reasons to remain in London during August, they sought to escape detection by keeping the windows fronting the street closely shuttered, and lived in their back rooms in unbroken contemplation of the leads and the mews. If you chanced to meet a man in Piccadilly in September, you might be sure that he would be wearing country clothes and would assure you that he was only "passing through" between Doncaster and Scotland. Nowadays the Season has no particular limits. London is nearly as full in Decemberas it is in May. Dinners and plays and suppers at restaurants are as frequent, and, barring the fogs, as bright, at Christmas as at Midsummer. Even in September Clubland is not deserted; and there are people bold enough to defy the world by returning from their summer exodus as early as October. The reason for the change, as for many others like it, is the reduction of territorial incomes. 1880 may be taken as, roughly, the last of the good years for agriculture. The incessant rains of 1879 had even then begun to tell their tale. Tenants were asking for big reductions, and farms hitherto eagerly sought were becoming unlettable. I know a landowner on a great scale who, a year or two later, only pocketed 10 per cent. of his income from land, whereas five years before he would have thought an abatement of 10 per cent. disastrous. All this has told increasingly on social life, for people found themselves unable to keep both a country house and a London house going at the same time, and, being driven to choose between the two, often decided to let the country house and its shooting and make London their headquarters for the whole year. So, by degrees, autumn faded imperceptibly into winter, winter into spring, and spring into summer. Each season in its turn found people dwelling peaceably in their urban habitations, entertaining and being entertained; and so "theSeason" lost its sharp edges. The meeting of Parliament broughtno perceptible change in the aspect of the town. "High Midsummer Pomps" were no longer so "high" as in former years, but,per contra, there was much more gaiety in the autumn and winter and early spring.

Another cause which has contributed to the effacement of the ancient time-marks is that the Court tends to disregard them. Under the present reign, Windsor Castle has become as much a social centre as Buckingham Palace. There are banquets in St. George's Hall in December, as well as garden-parties on the the Slopes in June; and so, under the action of Royal influence, the social seasons melt into one another, like the hues of the prism. Then, again, the practice of the "Weekend," imported from Lancashire and sanctioned by Westminster, helps to denude the town in summer; for the "end" tends naturally to prolong itself till it overlaps the beginning, and Friday-to-Tuesday parties, treading on the heels of Whitsuntide and to be followed in quick succession by Ascot, make mish-mash of what was aforetime "an entire and perfect chrysolite"—a complete and continuous whole.

In describing my hero of 1880 as he surveyed his evening's amusements and chose the most rewarding, I took for granted that he had at least three balls to choose from. Nowadays he is lucky if he has one. Here again, and conspicuously, agricultural depression has made itsmark. In the years between 1870 and 1880, during an unbroken spell of good trade and good harvests, rich people struggled with one another for a vacant night on which to entertain their friends. For example, Lady A. had just brought out a daughter, and wished to give a ball for her benefit. Say that she set her affections on Monday the 28th of May. Before she issued her cards she took counsel with all her friends, for in those days ball-giving mothers were a sort of Limited Company, and all knew one another. She found that Mrs. B. had mentally fixed on Tuesday, 29th, and, if Mrs. C. had thought of Monday, she would be so kind as to take Wednesday, 30th. So all was amicably agreed; there would be no clashing, which would be such a pity and would spoil both balls; and the cards were duly issued. Directly afterwards, as if moved by some occult and fiendish impulse, the Duchess of D—— pounced on Monday, 28th, for a Royal Ball at D—— House, or, worse still because more perilously tempting, for a "very small dance," to which all the nicest young men would go, and where they would stay till three. In the face of such mortifications as these, the emulous hospitalities of the aspiring Distiller were of no account; for the "nice men" would either disregard them, or, having looked in for half-an-hour, would come on to spend the night at the houses where they felt themselves at home.

The hero of 1880, if only he was well connected, well mannered, and sufficiently well known, might fairly reckon on dining six nights out of the seven at a host's expense. Indeed, if he was at all popular, he could safely afford to decline the invitation which old Mr. Wellbore issued six weeks in advance and reserve himself for a livelier meal at shorter notice. Not so to-day. Our young friend, if he has a constitutional objection to paying for his own dinner, must take what he can get in the way of invitations, and not be too particular about the cook or the company. Here the cause of change is not decrease of wealth. As long as there is a balance at the bank, and even when there is none, people will dine; and dinner-giving is the last form of hospitality which Society will let die. But nowadays dinners are made ancillary to Bridge. If our friend cannot afford to lose £50 in an evening he will not be asked to dine at a house which reckons itself as belonging to "the Mode"; or if, for old acquaintance' sake, he is allowed to find a place at the dinner-table, he is compelled to sit all the evening by the least attractive daughter of the house, or to listen to some fogey, too fossilized for Bridge, discoursing on the iniquities of Mr. Birrell's Bill. "Tobacco," said Lord Beaconsfield, "is the Tomb of Love." If he were with us now, he would pronounce that Bridge is the Extinguisher of Hospitality.

Yet once again I note a startling discrepancybetween the Season as it was and the Season as it is. Then a young man who wanted air and exercise in the afternoon played tennis at Lord's, or skated at Prince's, or took a gallop in Richmond Park, or, if he was very adventurous and up-to-date, sped out to Hampton Court or Windsor on a bone-shaking bicycle six feet high. All these recreations are possible to him to-day; but all have yielded to motoring. Dressed in the most unbecoming of all known costumes, his expressive eyes concealed by goggles, and his graceful proportions swathed in oilskin, he urges his mad career to Brighton or Stratford or Salisbury Plain. No doubt he has the most fascinating companions in the world, for girls are enthusiastic motorists; but I fancy that Edwin and Angelina presented a more attractive appearance when, neatly dressed and beautifully mounted, they rode in the cool of the evening along the shady side of Rotten Row.

However, I am a kind of social "Old Mortality" rummaging among the tombs of what has been and can be no more, and I fancy that Old Mortality's opinions on youth and beauty would have been justly disregarded.

XITHE SINS OF SOCIETYIn the year 1870 a flame of religious zeal was suddenly kindled in the West End of London. In that year the Rev. George Howard Wilkinson (now Bishop of St. Andrews) was appointed Vicar of St. Peter's, Eaton Square. The church in the Belgravian district was as dry as tinder; it caught fire from Mr. Wilkinson's fervour, and the fire soon became a conflagration. This is Matthew Arnold's description of the great preacher at the height of his power: "He was so evidently sincere, more than sincere, burnt up with sorrow, that he carried every one with him, and half the church was in tears. I do not much believe in good being done by a man unless he can givelight, and Wilkinson's fire is very turbid; but his power of heating, penetrating, and agitating is extraordinary." This description belongs to the year 1872, but it might have been written with equal truth at any date between 1870 and 1883. In all my experience of preaching (which is long, wide, and varied) I have never seen a congregation dominated by its minister so absolutely as thecongregation of St. Peter's was dominated by Mr. Wilkinson. I say "congregation" advisedly, for I should think that at least half the seatholders belonged to other parishes. The smartest carriages in London blocked the approach to the church. The great dames of Grosvenor Square and Carlton House Terrace rubbed shoulders with the opulent inhabitants of Tyburnia and South Kensington, Cabinet Ministers fought for places in the gallery, and M.P.'s were no more accounted of than silver in the days of Solomon.And this was not a mere assemblage of hearers. The congregation of St. Peter's were pre-eminently givers. £4000 a year was the regular product of the alms-bags, let alone the innumerable sums sent privately to the Vicar. "I want a thousand pounds." This simple but emphatic statement from the pulpit one Sunday was succeeded on the following Sunday by the quiet announcement, "I have got a thousand pounds." What was the secret of this attraction? It was entirely personal. It did not in the least depend on theological bias. Mr. Wilkinson belonged to no party. He had begun life as an Evangelical, and he retained the unction and fervour which were characteristic of that school at its best; but he was feeling his way towards a higher churchmanship, and had discarded most of his earlier shibboleths. The fabric was frankly hideous, and the well-meant attempts to make it look less like a barn and more like achurch only resulted in something between a mosque and a synagogue. There was no ritualism. The music was too elaborate for the choir, and the curates were feeble beyond all description. The Vicar was everything; and even he had none of the gifts which are commonly supposed to make a Popular Preacher. He was not the least flummery or flowery. He was reserved and dignified in manner, and his language was quite unadorned. His voice was a monotonous moan, occasionally rising into a howl. He was conspicuously free from the tendency to prophesy smooth things, and he even seemed to take a delight in rubbing the pungent lotion of his spiritual satire into the sore places of the hearers' conscience. If Jeremiah had prophesied in a surplice, he would have been like the Prophet of Belgravia; and as for Savonarola, his sermon, as paraphrased in chapter xxiv. of "Romola," might have been delivered, with scarcely a word altered, from the pulpit of St. Peter's.And here we touch the pith and core of Mr. Wilkinson's preaching. He rebuked the Sins of Society as no one had ventured to rebuke them since the days of Whitefield and the Wesleys. The Tractarian Movement, so heart-searching, so conscience-stirring at Oxford, had succumbed in the fashionable parts of London to the influences which surrounded it, and had degenerated into a sort of easy-going ceremonialism—partly antiquarian,partly worldly, and wholly ineffective for spiritual revival or moral reformation. Into this Dead Sea of lethargy and formalism Mr. Wilkinson burst like a gunboat. He scattered his fire left and right, aimed high and aimed low, blazed and bombarded without fear or favour; sent some crafts to the bottom, set fire to others, and covered the sea with wreckage. In less metaphorical language, he rebuked the sins of all and sundry, from Duchesses to scullery-maids, Premiers to pageboys, octogenarian rakes to damsels in their teens. Then, as now, Society loved to be scolded, and the more Mr. Wilkinson thundered the more it crowded to his feet. "Pay your bills." "Get up when you are called." "Don't stay till three at a ball and then say that you are too delicate for early services." "Eat one dinner a day instead of three, and try to earn that one." "Give up champagne for the season, and what you save on your wine-merchant's bill send to the Mission Field." "You are sixty-five years old and have not been confirmed. Never too late to mend. Join a Confirmation Class at once, and try to remedy, by good example now, all the harm you have done your servants or your neighbours by fifty years' indifference." "Sell that diamond cross which you carry with you into the sin-polluted atmosphere of the Opera, give the proceeds to feed the poor, and wear the only real cross—the cross of self-discipline and self-denial."These are echoes—faint, indeed, but not, I think, unfaithful—of thirty years ago, and they have suddenly been awoke from their long slumber by the sermons which Father Vaughan has just been preaching at the Jesuits' Church in Farm Street, Mayfair. The good Father, exalting his own church, perhaps a little unduly, at the expense of the Anglican churches in the district, observed complacently that "Farm Street, in spite of its extension, was all too small" for its congregation. For my own part, I do not belong to that fold, and I never wander to strange churches for the pleasure of having my ears tickled; so I only know Father Vaughan's utterances as they reach me through the newspapers. A report in the third person always tends to enfeeble rhetoric; but, in spite of that hindrance, Father Vaughan's style seems to lack nothing in the way of emphasis or directness. Here is a fragment of his sermon preached on Sunday the 10th of June 1906:—"It was no easy task for the votaries of pleasure when Sunday came round to all of a sudden forget their class distinctions, their privileged sets, their social successes, their worldly goods, and to remember that they were going into the presence of Him before whom man and woman were not what they happened to have, but what they happened to be—that the debutante beauty might be before God less than her maid who waited up half the night for her, nay, less than the meanest scullery-maidbelow stairs; while the millionaire with means to buy up whole countries might be in God's sight far less pleasing and very much more guilty than the lowest groom in his stable yard."Not less vigorous was the allocution of June 17."If Dives, who was buried in Hell, were to revisit the earth he would most surely have theentréeto London's smartest set to-day. He would be literally pelted with invitations. And why not? Dives, so well groomed and turned out, with such a well-lined larder and so well-stocked a cellar, would be the very ideal host to cultivate. He would 'do you so well,' you would meet the 'right people at his place,' and you could always bring your 'latest friend.' Besides, what a good time one would have at his house-parties, where there would be no fear of being bored or dull!"[5]And yet again:—"It was well when the winning-card fell into their hands, for then there was just a chance of some dressmaker or tradesman being paid something on account before becoming bankrupt. With such examples of the misuse of wealth before their eyes, it was a wonder there were not more Socialists than there actually were."All the memories of my youth have been revived by Father Vaughan. Instead of 1906, 1876; instead of the Gothic gloom of FarmStreet, the tawdry glare of St. Peter's, Eaton Square; instead of a Jesuit Father in the pulpit, a vigorous Protestant who renounces the Pope and all his works and glories in the Anglicanism of the Church of England. Grant those differences, which after all are more incidental than essential, and the sermons exactly reproduce those stirring days when the present Bishop of St. Andrews "shook the arsenal" of fashion, "thundered over" London, and achieved, as his admirers said, the supreme distinction of spoiling the London Season.I am convinced that the Higher Critics of a later age, collating the Wilkinsonian tradition with such fragments as remain of Father Vaughan's discourses, will come to the conclusion that "Wilkinson" never existed (except in Wordsworth's ode to the Spade), but was a kind of heroic figure conceived by a much later generation, which had quivered under the rhetoric of a real person or persons called Vaughan; and the opinion of the learned will be sharply divided on such questions as whether Vaughan was one or many; if one, whether he was a Priest, a Cardinal, a Head Master, or an Independent Minister; or whether he was all four at different stages of his career.

THE SINS OF SOCIETY

In the year 1870 a flame of religious zeal was suddenly kindled in the West End of London. In that year the Rev. George Howard Wilkinson (now Bishop of St. Andrews) was appointed Vicar of St. Peter's, Eaton Square. The church in the Belgravian district was as dry as tinder; it caught fire from Mr. Wilkinson's fervour, and the fire soon became a conflagration. This is Matthew Arnold's description of the great preacher at the height of his power: "He was so evidently sincere, more than sincere, burnt up with sorrow, that he carried every one with him, and half the church was in tears. I do not much believe in good being done by a man unless he can givelight, and Wilkinson's fire is very turbid; but his power of heating, penetrating, and agitating is extraordinary." This description belongs to the year 1872, but it might have been written with equal truth at any date between 1870 and 1883. In all my experience of preaching (which is long, wide, and varied) I have never seen a congregation dominated by its minister so absolutely as thecongregation of St. Peter's was dominated by Mr. Wilkinson. I say "congregation" advisedly, for I should think that at least half the seatholders belonged to other parishes. The smartest carriages in London blocked the approach to the church. The great dames of Grosvenor Square and Carlton House Terrace rubbed shoulders with the opulent inhabitants of Tyburnia and South Kensington, Cabinet Ministers fought for places in the gallery, and M.P.'s were no more accounted of than silver in the days of Solomon.

And this was not a mere assemblage of hearers. The congregation of St. Peter's were pre-eminently givers. £4000 a year was the regular product of the alms-bags, let alone the innumerable sums sent privately to the Vicar. "I want a thousand pounds." This simple but emphatic statement from the pulpit one Sunday was succeeded on the following Sunday by the quiet announcement, "I have got a thousand pounds." What was the secret of this attraction? It was entirely personal. It did not in the least depend on theological bias. Mr. Wilkinson belonged to no party. He had begun life as an Evangelical, and he retained the unction and fervour which were characteristic of that school at its best; but he was feeling his way towards a higher churchmanship, and had discarded most of his earlier shibboleths. The fabric was frankly hideous, and the well-meant attempts to make it look less like a barn and more like achurch only resulted in something between a mosque and a synagogue. There was no ritualism. The music was too elaborate for the choir, and the curates were feeble beyond all description. The Vicar was everything; and even he had none of the gifts which are commonly supposed to make a Popular Preacher. He was not the least flummery or flowery. He was reserved and dignified in manner, and his language was quite unadorned. His voice was a monotonous moan, occasionally rising into a howl. He was conspicuously free from the tendency to prophesy smooth things, and he even seemed to take a delight in rubbing the pungent lotion of his spiritual satire into the sore places of the hearers' conscience. If Jeremiah had prophesied in a surplice, he would have been like the Prophet of Belgravia; and as for Savonarola, his sermon, as paraphrased in chapter xxiv. of "Romola," might have been delivered, with scarcely a word altered, from the pulpit of St. Peter's.

And here we touch the pith and core of Mr. Wilkinson's preaching. He rebuked the Sins of Society as no one had ventured to rebuke them since the days of Whitefield and the Wesleys. The Tractarian Movement, so heart-searching, so conscience-stirring at Oxford, had succumbed in the fashionable parts of London to the influences which surrounded it, and had degenerated into a sort of easy-going ceremonialism—partly antiquarian,partly worldly, and wholly ineffective for spiritual revival or moral reformation. Into this Dead Sea of lethargy and formalism Mr. Wilkinson burst like a gunboat. He scattered his fire left and right, aimed high and aimed low, blazed and bombarded without fear or favour; sent some crafts to the bottom, set fire to others, and covered the sea with wreckage. In less metaphorical language, he rebuked the sins of all and sundry, from Duchesses to scullery-maids, Premiers to pageboys, octogenarian rakes to damsels in their teens. Then, as now, Society loved to be scolded, and the more Mr. Wilkinson thundered the more it crowded to his feet. "Pay your bills." "Get up when you are called." "Don't stay till three at a ball and then say that you are too delicate for early services." "Eat one dinner a day instead of three, and try to earn that one." "Give up champagne for the season, and what you save on your wine-merchant's bill send to the Mission Field." "You are sixty-five years old and have not been confirmed. Never too late to mend. Join a Confirmation Class at once, and try to remedy, by good example now, all the harm you have done your servants or your neighbours by fifty years' indifference." "Sell that diamond cross which you carry with you into the sin-polluted atmosphere of the Opera, give the proceeds to feed the poor, and wear the only real cross—the cross of self-discipline and self-denial."

These are echoes—faint, indeed, but not, I think, unfaithful—of thirty years ago, and they have suddenly been awoke from their long slumber by the sermons which Father Vaughan has just been preaching at the Jesuits' Church in Farm Street, Mayfair. The good Father, exalting his own church, perhaps a little unduly, at the expense of the Anglican churches in the district, observed complacently that "Farm Street, in spite of its extension, was all too small" for its congregation. For my own part, I do not belong to that fold, and I never wander to strange churches for the pleasure of having my ears tickled; so I only know Father Vaughan's utterances as they reach me through the newspapers. A report in the third person always tends to enfeeble rhetoric; but, in spite of that hindrance, Father Vaughan's style seems to lack nothing in the way of emphasis or directness. Here is a fragment of his sermon preached on Sunday the 10th of June 1906:—

"It was no easy task for the votaries of pleasure when Sunday came round to all of a sudden forget their class distinctions, their privileged sets, their social successes, their worldly goods, and to remember that they were going into the presence of Him before whom man and woman were not what they happened to have, but what they happened to be—that the debutante beauty might be before God less than her maid who waited up half the night for her, nay, less than the meanest scullery-maidbelow stairs; while the millionaire with means to buy up whole countries might be in God's sight far less pleasing and very much more guilty than the lowest groom in his stable yard."

Not less vigorous was the allocution of June 17.

"If Dives, who was buried in Hell, were to revisit the earth he would most surely have theentréeto London's smartest set to-day. He would be literally pelted with invitations. And why not? Dives, so well groomed and turned out, with such a well-lined larder and so well-stocked a cellar, would be the very ideal host to cultivate. He would 'do you so well,' you would meet the 'right people at his place,' and you could always bring your 'latest friend.' Besides, what a good time one would have at his house-parties, where there would be no fear of being bored or dull!"[5]

And yet again:—

"It was well when the winning-card fell into their hands, for then there was just a chance of some dressmaker or tradesman being paid something on account before becoming bankrupt. With such examples of the misuse of wealth before their eyes, it was a wonder there were not more Socialists than there actually were."

All the memories of my youth have been revived by Father Vaughan. Instead of 1906, 1876; instead of the Gothic gloom of FarmStreet, the tawdry glare of St. Peter's, Eaton Square; instead of a Jesuit Father in the pulpit, a vigorous Protestant who renounces the Pope and all his works and glories in the Anglicanism of the Church of England. Grant those differences, which after all are more incidental than essential, and the sermons exactly reproduce those stirring days when the present Bishop of St. Andrews "shook the arsenal" of fashion, "thundered over" London, and achieved, as his admirers said, the supreme distinction of spoiling the London Season.

I am convinced that the Higher Critics of a later age, collating the Wilkinsonian tradition with such fragments as remain of Father Vaughan's discourses, will come to the conclusion that "Wilkinson" never existed (except in Wordsworth's ode to the Spade), but was a kind of heroic figure conceived by a much later generation, which had quivered under the rhetoric of a real person or persons called Vaughan; and the opinion of the learned will be sharply divided on such questions as whether Vaughan was one or many; if one, whether he was a Priest, a Cardinal, a Head Master, or an Independent Minister; or whether he was all four at different stages of his career.

XIIOXFORD"Once, my dear—but the world was young then—Magdalen elms and Trinity limes,—Lissom the oars and backs that swung then,Eight good men in the good old times—Careless we and the chorus flung then.Under St. Mary's chimes!"Still on her spire the pigeons hover;Still by her gateway flits the gown;Ah, but her secret? You, young lover,Drumming her old ones forth from town,Know you the secret none discover?Tell it—whenyougo down."What Matthew Arnold did for the interpretation of Oxford through the medium of prose, that Mr. Quiller-Couch has done through the medium of verse. In the poem from which I have just quoted two stanzas he conveys, as no one else has ever conveyed it in poetry, the tender and elusive charm of that incomparable place."Know you her secret none can utter—Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown?"It is a hard question, and susceptible of some veryprosaic and therefore inappropriate answers. The true answer can, I think, only be given by those for whom Oxford lies, half hid, in the enchanted past: "Tell it—whenyougo down."Some parts of the spell which Oxford exercises on those who are subjected to her influence are in no sense secret. We perceive them from the day when we first set foot within her precincts, and the sense of them abides with us for ever."If less insensible than sodden clayIn a sea-river's bed at ebb of tide,"all sons of Oxford must realize her material beauty, her historical pre-eminence, her contribution to thought and culture, her influence on the religious life of England."Ah, but her secret? You, young lover."There is nothing secret about all this; it is palpable and manifest; and yet it does not exhaust the spell. Something there is that remains undiscovered, or at best half-discovered—felt and guessed at, but not clearly apprehended—until we have passed away from the "dreaming spires"—the cloisters and the gardens and the river—to that sterner life for which these mysterious enchantments have been preparing us."Know you the secret none discover?"If you do, that is proof that time has done its work and has brought to the test of practical result the influences which were shaping your mind and,still more potently, your heart, between eighteen and twenty-two. What that "secret" is, let an unworthy son of Oxford try to tell.To begin with a negative, it is not the secret of Nirvana. There are misguided critics abroad in the land who seem to assume that life lived easily in a beautiful place, amid a society which includes all knowledge in its comprehensive survey, and far remote from the human tragedy of poverty and toil and pain, must necessarily be calm. And so, as regards the actual work and warfare of mankind, it may be. The bitter cry of starving Poplar does not very readily penetrate to the well-spread table of an Oxford common-room. In a laburnum-clad villa in the Parks we can afford to reason very temperately about life in cities where five families camp in one room. But when we leave the actualities of life and come to the region of thought and opinion, all the pent energy of Oxford seethes and stirs. The Hebrew word for "Prophet" comes, I believe, from a root which signifies to bubble like water on the flames; and in this fervency of thought and feeling Oxford is characteristically prophetic. It is a tradition that in some year of the passion-torn 'forties the subject for the Newdigate Prize Poem was Cromwell, whereas the subject for the corresponding poem at Cambridge was Plato. In that selection Oxford was true to herself. For a century at least (even if we leave out of sight her earlier convulsions) shehas been the battle-field of contending sects. Her air has resounded with party-cries, and the dead bodies of the controversially slain have lain thick in her streets. All the opposing forces of Church and State, of theology and politics, of philosophy and science, of literary and social and economic theory, have contended for mastery in the place which Matthew Arnold, with rare irony, described as "so unruffled by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!" Every succeeding generation of Oxford men has borne its part in these ever-recurring strifes. To hold aloof from them would have been poltroonery. Passionately convinced (at twenty) that we had sworn ourselves for life to each cause which we espoused, we have pleaded and planned and denounced and persuaded; have struck the shrewdest blows which our strength could compass, and devised the most dangerous pitfalls which wit could suggest. Nothing came of it all, and nothing could come, except the ruin of our appointed studies and the resulting dislocation of all subsequent life. But we were obeying the irresistible impulse of the time and the place in which our lot was cast, and we were ready to risk our all upon the venture."Never we wince, though none deplore us,We who go reaping that we sowed;Cities at cockcrow wake before us—Hey, for the lilt of the London road!One look back, and a rousing chorus!Never a palinode!"It is when we have finally sung that chorus and have travelled a few miles upon that road, that we learn the secret which we never discovered while as yet Oxford held us in the thick of the fight. We thought then that we were the most desperate partizans; we asked no quarter, and gave none; pushed our argumentative victories to their uttermost consequences, and made short work of a fallen foe. But, when all the old battle-cries have died out of our ears, we begin to perceive humaner voices. All at once we realize that a great part of our old contentions was only sound and fury and self-deception, and that, though the causes for which we strove may have been absolutely right, our opponents were not necessarily villains. In a word, we have learnt the Secret of Oxford. All the time that we were fighting and fuming, the higher and subtler influences of the place were moulding us, unconscious though we were, to a more gracious ideal. We had really learnt to distinguish between intellectual error and moral obliquity. We could differ from another on every point of the political and theological compass, and yet in our hearts acknowledge him to be the best of all good fellows. Without surrendering a single conviction, we came to see the virtue of so stating our beliefs as to persuade and propitiate, instead of offending and alienating. We had attained to that temper which, in the sphere of thought and opinion,is analogous to the crowning virtue of Christian charity."Tell it—whenyougo down."Lately it has been my privilege to address a considerable gathering of Oxford undergraduates, all keenly alive to the interests and controversies of the present hour, all devotedly loyal to the tradition of Oxford as each understood it, and all with their eyes eagerly fixed on "the wistful limit of the world." With such an audience it was inevitable to insist on the graces and benedictions which Oxford can confer, and to dwell on Mr. Gladstone's dogma that to call a man a "typically Oxford man" is to bestow the highest possible praise.But this was not all. Something more remained to be said. It was for a speaker who had travelled for thirty years on "the London road" to state as plainly as he could his own deepest obligation to the place which had decided the course and complexion of his life. And, when it was difficult to express that obligation in the pedestrian prose of an after-dinner speech, he turned for succour to the poet who sang of "the secret none discover." Wherever philosophical insight is combined with literary genius and personal charm, one says instinctively, "That man is, or ought to be, an Oxford man." Chiefest among the great names which Oxford ought to claim but cannot is the name of Edmund Burke;and the "Secret" on which we have been discoursing seems to be conveyed with luminous precision in his description of the ideal character: "It is our business ... to bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots as not to forget we are gentlemen; to cultivate friendships and to incur enmities; to have both strong, but both selected—in the one to be placable, in the other immovable." Whoso has attained to that ideal has learnt the "Secret" of Oxford.

OXFORD

"Once, my dear—but the world was young then—Magdalen elms and Trinity limes,—

Lissom the oars and backs that swung then,Eight good men in the good old times—

Careless we and the chorus flung then.

Under St. Mary's chimes!

"Still on her spire the pigeons hover;Still by her gateway flits the gown;

Ah, but her secret? You, young lover,Drumming her old ones forth from town,

Know you the secret none discover?

Tell it—whenyougo down."

What Matthew Arnold did for the interpretation of Oxford through the medium of prose, that Mr. Quiller-Couch has done through the medium of verse. In the poem from which I have just quoted two stanzas he conveys, as no one else has ever conveyed it in poetry, the tender and elusive charm of that incomparable place.

"Know you her secret none can utter—Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown?"

It is a hard question, and susceptible of some veryprosaic and therefore inappropriate answers. The true answer can, I think, only be given by those for whom Oxford lies, half hid, in the enchanted past: "Tell it—whenyougo down."

Some parts of the spell which Oxford exercises on those who are subjected to her influence are in no sense secret. We perceive them from the day when we first set foot within her precincts, and the sense of them abides with us for ever.

"If less insensible than sodden clayIn a sea-river's bed at ebb of tide,"

all sons of Oxford must realize her material beauty, her historical pre-eminence, her contribution to thought and culture, her influence on the religious life of England.

"Ah, but her secret? You, young lover."

There is nothing secret about all this; it is palpable and manifest; and yet it does not exhaust the spell. Something there is that remains undiscovered, or at best half-discovered—felt and guessed at, but not clearly apprehended—until we have passed away from the "dreaming spires"—the cloisters and the gardens and the river—to that sterner life for which these mysterious enchantments have been preparing us.

"Know you the secret none discover?"

If you do, that is proof that time has done its work and has brought to the test of practical result the influences which were shaping your mind and,still more potently, your heart, between eighteen and twenty-two. What that "secret" is, let an unworthy son of Oxford try to tell.

To begin with a negative, it is not the secret of Nirvana. There are misguided critics abroad in the land who seem to assume that life lived easily in a beautiful place, amid a society which includes all knowledge in its comprehensive survey, and far remote from the human tragedy of poverty and toil and pain, must necessarily be calm. And so, as regards the actual work and warfare of mankind, it may be. The bitter cry of starving Poplar does not very readily penetrate to the well-spread table of an Oxford common-room. In a laburnum-clad villa in the Parks we can afford to reason very temperately about life in cities where five families camp in one room. But when we leave the actualities of life and come to the region of thought and opinion, all the pent energy of Oxford seethes and stirs. The Hebrew word for "Prophet" comes, I believe, from a root which signifies to bubble like water on the flames; and in this fervency of thought and feeling Oxford is characteristically prophetic. It is a tradition that in some year of the passion-torn 'forties the subject for the Newdigate Prize Poem was Cromwell, whereas the subject for the corresponding poem at Cambridge was Plato. In that selection Oxford was true to herself. For a century at least (even if we leave out of sight her earlier convulsions) shehas been the battle-field of contending sects. Her air has resounded with party-cries, and the dead bodies of the controversially slain have lain thick in her streets. All the opposing forces of Church and State, of theology and politics, of philosophy and science, of literary and social and economic theory, have contended for mastery in the place which Matthew Arnold, with rare irony, described as "so unruffled by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!" Every succeeding generation of Oxford men has borne its part in these ever-recurring strifes. To hold aloof from them would have been poltroonery. Passionately convinced (at twenty) that we had sworn ourselves for life to each cause which we espoused, we have pleaded and planned and denounced and persuaded; have struck the shrewdest blows which our strength could compass, and devised the most dangerous pitfalls which wit could suggest. Nothing came of it all, and nothing could come, except the ruin of our appointed studies and the resulting dislocation of all subsequent life. But we were obeying the irresistible impulse of the time and the place in which our lot was cast, and we were ready to risk our all upon the venture.

"Never we wince, though none deplore us,We who go reaping that we sowed;

Cities at cockcrow wake before us—Hey, for the lilt of the London road!

One look back, and a rousing chorus!

Never a palinode!"

It is when we have finally sung that chorus and have travelled a few miles upon that road, that we learn the secret which we never discovered while as yet Oxford held us in the thick of the fight. We thought then that we were the most desperate partizans; we asked no quarter, and gave none; pushed our argumentative victories to their uttermost consequences, and made short work of a fallen foe. But, when all the old battle-cries have died out of our ears, we begin to perceive humaner voices. All at once we realize that a great part of our old contentions was only sound and fury and self-deception, and that, though the causes for which we strove may have been absolutely right, our opponents were not necessarily villains. In a word, we have learnt the Secret of Oxford. All the time that we were fighting and fuming, the higher and subtler influences of the place were moulding us, unconscious though we were, to a more gracious ideal. We had really learnt to distinguish between intellectual error and moral obliquity. We could differ from another on every point of the political and theological compass, and yet in our hearts acknowledge him to be the best of all good fellows. Without surrendering a single conviction, we came to see the virtue of so stating our beliefs as to persuade and propitiate, instead of offending and alienating. We had attained to that temper which, in the sphere of thought and opinion,is analogous to the crowning virtue of Christian charity.

"Tell it—whenyougo down."

Lately it has been my privilege to address a considerable gathering of Oxford undergraduates, all keenly alive to the interests and controversies of the present hour, all devotedly loyal to the tradition of Oxford as each understood it, and all with their eyes eagerly fixed on "the wistful limit of the world." With such an audience it was inevitable to insist on the graces and benedictions which Oxford can confer, and to dwell on Mr. Gladstone's dogma that to call a man a "typically Oxford man" is to bestow the highest possible praise.

But this was not all. Something more remained to be said. It was for a speaker who had travelled for thirty years on "the London road" to state as plainly as he could his own deepest obligation to the place which had decided the course and complexion of his life. And, when it was difficult to express that obligation in the pedestrian prose of an after-dinner speech, he turned for succour to the poet who sang of "the secret none discover." Wherever philosophical insight is combined with literary genius and personal charm, one says instinctively, "That man is, or ought to be, an Oxford man." Chiefest among the great names which Oxford ought to claim but cannot is the name of Edmund Burke;and the "Secret" on which we have been discoursing seems to be conveyed with luminous precision in his description of the ideal character: "It is our business ... to bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots as not to forget we are gentlemen; to cultivate friendships and to incur enmities; to have both strong, but both selected—in the one to be placable, in the other immovable." Whoso has attained to that ideal has learnt the "Secret" of Oxford.

XIIISCHOOLS FOR SHEPHERDS"The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed."Why not? Because the Shepherds are so imperfectly trained for their business. This, at any rate, is the testimony of a Canon (sometime Examining Chaplain to a Bishop) who at the Diocesan Conference at Ely the other day declared that the clergy were "not qualified to provide instruction in Church Doctrine for the laity because they were not properly trained"; and further testified that "Nonconformist Ministers were much better trained" than the English Clergy. This testimony from a superior Shepherd is rather startling for the Sheep, and it suggests some interesting comparisons. It is, I take it, unquestionable that Nonconformist ministers and Roman Catholic priests alike have much more of a technical education than is thought necessary for their Anglican brothers. They are, so to say, caught early, and their studies from seventeen or eighteen onwards are directed steadily towards their appointed work in life. A Roman Seminarist learns his Latin and Greek as subsidiary to higherstudies; he spends, I believe, two years in Philosophy and four in Theology, and is harassed by incessant examinations. The training of the youth who aspires to the Nonconformist ministry is of much the same kind. "Moral Theology," in other words the Science of the Confessional, he naturally does not learn; but, on the other hand, he is sedulously trained for the work of public speaking and preaching. "If you can't preach," said Spurgeon to his students at Stockwell, "it is a clear proof that God doesn't mean you to be a preacher, and you must choose some other occupation."Vastly different is the training of the English Curate. Private School, Public School, and University: cricket, football, rowing: elementary Greek and Latin, and a smattering of Law or History—these constitute his "atmosphere," his moral and mental discipline, between the ages of ten and twenty-three. Even more remarkable is his theological equipment. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he knows absolutely nothing about the Church of which he is to be a minister, her doctrines, history, or practical system. He has been enveloped from his youth up by a hazy atmosphere of Undogmatic Religion. I well remember that an Undergraduate friend of mine, who came to Oxford from Dr. Temple's Sixth Form at Rugby, declined to believe that there are two Sacraments. That there was a religiousceremony called "The Sacrament," for which some people stayed after the ordinary service, he was well aware, as also that infants were ceremonially sprinkled; but that this latter ceremony was a Sacrament he could not be induced to believe. During his last year at Oxford he informed himself better on this and some similar topics, and a year afterwards was preaching, with great acceptance, to a fashionable congregation. From what I knew of my friend's theological attainments, I should imagine that the Bishop's Examination could not have been a very terrifying process; but forty years earlier it must have been even less formidable. The Hon. and Rev. George Spencer (uncle of the present Lord Spencer) was destined from an early age for the Family Living in Northamptonshire. He hunted and shot, and danced, and travelled on the Continent, and held a commission in the Yeomanry. After two years at Trinity College, Cambridge, he took a "Nobleman's Degree," and, when he neared the canonical age of twenty-three, he wrote to the Bishop of Peterborough's Examining Chaplain offering himself for Ordination and asking advice as to his preparation. The examiner—ah, would that there were more like him!—wrote back:—"It is impossible that I should ever entertain any idea of subjecting a gentleman with whose talents and good qualities I am so well acquainted as I am with yours to any examination except asa matter of form, for which a verse in the Greek Testament and an Article of the Church of England returned into Latin will be amply sufficient."This reassuring letter was written on the 12th of October 1822, and on the 22nd of December next ensuing George Spencer was ordained Deacon and a year later Priest. "On the evening before the ordination, whilst the Bishop and various clergymen and their ladies and the candidates amused themselves with a rubber of whist, Mr. Spencer refused to play." And the refusal was considered, as perhaps it was, noteworthy.The Movement which issued from Oxford in 1833 introduced some improvement into the method of conducting ordinations, as into other departments of the Church's work. The examination became, though not yet very serious, at least a little less farcical, and some attempt was made in charges and sermons to urge upon the candidates the gravity of what they were undertaking. But, according to the late Bishop Woodford, "the evenings, during which they were left to themselves, became evenings of social enjoyment, if not of boisterous merriment, in which the features of an old college supper-party were reproduced, rather than intervals of solemn thought and retirement."Bishop Samuel Wilberforce raised the standard of what was expected in the way of Scriptural and theological knowledge; he made the examinationa reality; he laid special stress on sermon-writing; and he made the Ember Week a season of spiritual retirement in which men about to take the most decisive step in life might be brought face to face with the responsibilities involved in their decision. The example set by Wilberforce was followed, sooner or later, by every bishop on the bench; the requirements have been raised, and the system has been developed and improved; but the credit of initiation belongs to that epoch-making episcopate, which began in 1845 and ended, through a false step made by a horse on the Surrey Downs, on the 19th of July 1873.It soon became apparent to those who had the spiritual interests of the Church at heart that something more than twelve months' book-work and a week of religious retirement was required to wean the ordinary B.A. from the puerilities—if nothing worse—of his Undergraduate life, and to equip him for a life of Pastorship and Teachership. The sense of this need gave rise to the creation of Theological Colleges, where a man who looked forward to Holy Orders might, after taking his ordinary degree at Oxford or Cambridge, apply himself to the studies more specially necessary for his chosen work, and—even more important still—might acquire the habits of methodical and self-disciplined life. The idea took shape in such foundations as the Theological Colleges of Wells, Cuddesdon, Sarum, and Ely, theScholæ Cancellariiat Lincoln, and the Clergy School at Leeds. Fighting their way through all manner of strange misrepresentations about Monasticism and Mediævalism, they have in the course of years attained to recognition, popularity, and apparent stability. The bishops patronize them warmly, and incumbents who desire curates not wholly ignorant of their craft are increasingly unwilling to engage one who has not passed through a Theological College. That the broad result of the training given in these seminaries is a general increase in clerical efficiency I cannot doubt, but perhaps a layman may be permitted to point out some curious gaps and lapses in that training which go some way towards making clergymen less esteemed, and therefore less influential, than they ought to be.1. The Clergy are not taught to be courteous. If they are courteous by nature and habit, well and good; but a rough Undergraduate, destitute of sympathy and tact and ignorant of social usage, passes through a Theological College and comes out as rough as he entered it. A Bear in Holy Orders is as destructive as a Bull in a China Shop.2. The Clergy are not taught to manage money; they muddle their public accounts; they beg money for one object and use it for another; they seldom acknowledge what they receive by post; and they have absolutely no notion of cutting their coat according to their cloth. "Spend andbeg, and the money will come from somewhere" is their simple and sufficient creed.3. The Clergy are not taught business. They have not the faintest notion of conducting a public meeting. They lose their way in the agenda-paper of the most insignificant committee. They break appointments at their will and pleasure. They seldom answer letters, and are frankly astonished when their correspondents are annoyed.4. The Clergy are not taught the Science of Citizenship. Outside their strictly professional studies (and, in some cases, the records of athleticism) they are the most ignorant set of young men in the world. They work hard and play hard, but they never read. They know nothing of books, nothing of history, nothing of the Constitution under which they live, of the principles and records of political parties, of the need for social reform or the means of securing it. They have a vague but clinging notion that Radicals are Infidels, and that Dissenters, if they got their deserts, would have their heads punched.Sixty years ago an Italian critic said that, in spite of all their defects, the English clergy were "Un clero colto e civile." Could as much be said to-day?

SCHOOLS FOR SHEPHERDS

"The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed."

Why not? Because the Shepherds are so imperfectly trained for their business. This, at any rate, is the testimony of a Canon (sometime Examining Chaplain to a Bishop) who at the Diocesan Conference at Ely the other day declared that the clergy were "not qualified to provide instruction in Church Doctrine for the laity because they were not properly trained"; and further testified that "Nonconformist Ministers were much better trained" than the English Clergy. This testimony from a superior Shepherd is rather startling for the Sheep, and it suggests some interesting comparisons. It is, I take it, unquestionable that Nonconformist ministers and Roman Catholic priests alike have much more of a technical education than is thought necessary for their Anglican brothers. They are, so to say, caught early, and their studies from seventeen or eighteen onwards are directed steadily towards their appointed work in life. A Roman Seminarist learns his Latin and Greek as subsidiary to higherstudies; he spends, I believe, two years in Philosophy and four in Theology, and is harassed by incessant examinations. The training of the youth who aspires to the Nonconformist ministry is of much the same kind. "Moral Theology," in other words the Science of the Confessional, he naturally does not learn; but, on the other hand, he is sedulously trained for the work of public speaking and preaching. "If you can't preach," said Spurgeon to his students at Stockwell, "it is a clear proof that God doesn't mean you to be a preacher, and you must choose some other occupation."

Vastly different is the training of the English Curate. Private School, Public School, and University: cricket, football, rowing: elementary Greek and Latin, and a smattering of Law or History—these constitute his "atmosphere," his moral and mental discipline, between the ages of ten and twenty-three. Even more remarkable is his theological equipment. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he knows absolutely nothing about the Church of which he is to be a minister, her doctrines, history, or practical system. He has been enveloped from his youth up by a hazy atmosphere of Undogmatic Religion. I well remember that an Undergraduate friend of mine, who came to Oxford from Dr. Temple's Sixth Form at Rugby, declined to believe that there are two Sacraments. That there was a religiousceremony called "The Sacrament," for which some people stayed after the ordinary service, he was well aware, as also that infants were ceremonially sprinkled; but that this latter ceremony was a Sacrament he could not be induced to believe. During his last year at Oxford he informed himself better on this and some similar topics, and a year afterwards was preaching, with great acceptance, to a fashionable congregation. From what I knew of my friend's theological attainments, I should imagine that the Bishop's Examination could not have been a very terrifying process; but forty years earlier it must have been even less formidable. The Hon. and Rev. George Spencer (uncle of the present Lord Spencer) was destined from an early age for the Family Living in Northamptonshire. He hunted and shot, and danced, and travelled on the Continent, and held a commission in the Yeomanry. After two years at Trinity College, Cambridge, he took a "Nobleman's Degree," and, when he neared the canonical age of twenty-three, he wrote to the Bishop of Peterborough's Examining Chaplain offering himself for Ordination and asking advice as to his preparation. The examiner—ah, would that there were more like him!—wrote back:—

"It is impossible that I should ever entertain any idea of subjecting a gentleman with whose talents and good qualities I am so well acquainted as I am with yours to any examination except asa matter of form, for which a verse in the Greek Testament and an Article of the Church of England returned into Latin will be amply sufficient."

This reassuring letter was written on the 12th of October 1822, and on the 22nd of December next ensuing George Spencer was ordained Deacon and a year later Priest. "On the evening before the ordination, whilst the Bishop and various clergymen and their ladies and the candidates amused themselves with a rubber of whist, Mr. Spencer refused to play." And the refusal was considered, as perhaps it was, noteworthy.

The Movement which issued from Oxford in 1833 introduced some improvement into the method of conducting ordinations, as into other departments of the Church's work. The examination became, though not yet very serious, at least a little less farcical, and some attempt was made in charges and sermons to urge upon the candidates the gravity of what they were undertaking. But, according to the late Bishop Woodford, "the evenings, during which they were left to themselves, became evenings of social enjoyment, if not of boisterous merriment, in which the features of an old college supper-party were reproduced, rather than intervals of solemn thought and retirement."

Bishop Samuel Wilberforce raised the standard of what was expected in the way of Scriptural and theological knowledge; he made the examinationa reality; he laid special stress on sermon-writing; and he made the Ember Week a season of spiritual retirement in which men about to take the most decisive step in life might be brought face to face with the responsibilities involved in their decision. The example set by Wilberforce was followed, sooner or later, by every bishop on the bench; the requirements have been raised, and the system has been developed and improved; but the credit of initiation belongs to that epoch-making episcopate, which began in 1845 and ended, through a false step made by a horse on the Surrey Downs, on the 19th of July 1873.

It soon became apparent to those who had the spiritual interests of the Church at heart that something more than twelve months' book-work and a week of religious retirement was required to wean the ordinary B.A. from the puerilities—if nothing worse—of his Undergraduate life, and to equip him for a life of Pastorship and Teachership. The sense of this need gave rise to the creation of Theological Colleges, where a man who looked forward to Holy Orders might, after taking his ordinary degree at Oxford or Cambridge, apply himself to the studies more specially necessary for his chosen work, and—even more important still—might acquire the habits of methodical and self-disciplined life. The idea took shape in such foundations as the Theological Colleges of Wells, Cuddesdon, Sarum, and Ely, theScholæ Cancellariiat Lincoln, and the Clergy School at Leeds. Fighting their way through all manner of strange misrepresentations about Monasticism and Mediævalism, they have in the course of years attained to recognition, popularity, and apparent stability. The bishops patronize them warmly, and incumbents who desire curates not wholly ignorant of their craft are increasingly unwilling to engage one who has not passed through a Theological College. That the broad result of the training given in these seminaries is a general increase in clerical efficiency I cannot doubt, but perhaps a layman may be permitted to point out some curious gaps and lapses in that training which go some way towards making clergymen less esteemed, and therefore less influential, than they ought to be.

1. The Clergy are not taught to be courteous. If they are courteous by nature and habit, well and good; but a rough Undergraduate, destitute of sympathy and tact and ignorant of social usage, passes through a Theological College and comes out as rough as he entered it. A Bear in Holy Orders is as destructive as a Bull in a China Shop.

2. The Clergy are not taught to manage money; they muddle their public accounts; they beg money for one object and use it for another; they seldom acknowledge what they receive by post; and they have absolutely no notion of cutting their coat according to their cloth. "Spend andbeg, and the money will come from somewhere" is their simple and sufficient creed.

3. The Clergy are not taught business. They have not the faintest notion of conducting a public meeting. They lose their way in the agenda-paper of the most insignificant committee. They break appointments at their will and pleasure. They seldom answer letters, and are frankly astonished when their correspondents are annoyed.

4. The Clergy are not taught the Science of Citizenship. Outside their strictly professional studies (and, in some cases, the records of athleticism) they are the most ignorant set of young men in the world. They work hard and play hard, but they never read. They know nothing of books, nothing of history, nothing of the Constitution under which they live, of the principles and records of political parties, of the need for social reform or the means of securing it. They have a vague but clinging notion that Radicals are Infidels, and that Dissenters, if they got their deserts, would have their heads punched.

Sixty years ago an Italian critic said that, in spite of all their defects, the English clergy were "Un clero colto e civile." Could as much be said to-day?

XIVPILGRIMAGESI use the word in something wider than Chaucer's sense, and yet in a sense not wholly different from his. For, though we no longer make an annual visit to the Shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, still we all feel bound, at least once a year, to go somewhere and do something quite out of our normal course. Perhaps, like Chaucer's friends, we "long" to do this in April, but the claims of business are generally too strong for us; so we have to content ourselves with admiring the peeps of greenery which begin to invade the soot of our urban gardens, and, if we are of a cultured habit, we can always quote Browning's Thrush or strain the kalendar so as to admit Wordsworth's Daffodils.This notion of a yearly Pilgrimage as a necessity of rightly-ordered life seems to have fallen into a long abeyance. "Dan Chaucer" (for I love to be on easy terms with great men) described the social customs of the fourteenth century, and then the Pilgrimage seems to have been an established institution: "Tom Hughes" described those ofthe eighteenth, and this is what, writing in 1862, he says about the annual Pilgrimages of his own time:—"I have been credibly informed, and am inclined to believe, that the various Boards of Directors of Railway Companies agreed together some ten years back to buy up the learned profession of Medicine, body and soul. To this end they set apart several millions of money, which they continually distribute judiciously among the Doctors, stipulating only this one thing—that they shall prescribe change of air to every patient who can pay, or borrow money to pay, a railway fare, and see their prescription carried out. If it be not for this, why is it that none of us can be well at home for a year together? It wasn't so twenty years ago—not a bit of it. The Browns did not go out of the county once in five years."The Browns, as we all know, stood in Mr. Hughes's vocabulary for the Upper Middle Class of England—the class to which the clergy, the smaller squires, and the professional men belong; the class which in Chaucer's time contained the "Man of Lawe," the "Marchande," the "Franklyne," and the "Doctore of Phisyke"; and, although Mr. Hughes, who ought to know, says that in the earlier part of Queen Victoria's reign they were a stay-at-home class, they are now the most regular and the most zealous of Pilgrims. It was the majestic misfortune of the Duke in"Lothair" to have so many houses that he had no home. People so circumstanced do not need to go on Pilgrimages. After the autumn in a Scotch Castle, the winter in a country house in the Midlands, the spring in another in the Southern Counties, and the season in Grosvenor Square, people are glad of a little rest, and seek it in some "proud alcove" on the Thames or a sea-girt villa at Cowes. Unless their livers drive them to Carlsbad or their hearts to Nauheim, they do not travel, but display what Lord Beaconsfield called "the sustained splendour of their stately lives" in the many mansions which, in the aggregate, represent to them the idea of Home. I might perhaps on another occasion sketch the Grand Tour of Europe, on which, for educational purposes, the Earl of Fitzurse used to send his eldest son, young Lord Cubley; compressed, with his tutor and doctor, into a travelling-carriage, with a valet and a courier in the rumble. The Duke of Argyll's Autobiography has just told us what this kind of Pilgrimage was like; but to-day I am dealing with the present rather than the past.It is the people with one house who go on Pilgrimages nowadays—the impoverished squire, the smoke-dried clergyman, the exhausted merchant, the harried editor. To these must be added all the inhabitants, male and female, of Lodging-land and Flat-land,—all "the dim, common populations" of Stuccovia and Suburbia. Thereare mysterious laws of association which connect classes with localities. Tradesmen love Margate; to clerks Scarborough is dear. The Semitic financier has long claimed Brighton for his own. Costermongers go hop-picking in Kent; artizans disport themselves on the nigger-haunted pier of Southend. Governed by some mysterious law of their being, schoolmasters make straight for the Alps. There they live the strenuous life and brave the perilous ascent; climb and puff and pant all day; rush in, very untidy and not very clean, totable d'hôte; and season their meal with the "shop" of St. Winifred's or the gay banter of Rosslyn Common-room. It is agreeable to watch the forced cordiality, the thin tutorial humour, with which they greet some quite irresponsive pupil who happens to have strayed into the same hotel; and I have often had occasion to admire the precocious dexterity with which the pupil extricates himself from this dreaded companionship. Of Mr. Gladstone it was said by his detractors that he had something of the Schoolmaster in his composition; and this trait was aptly illustrated when, during the summer holidays some fifty years ago, he met the late Duchess of Abercorn in a country house accompanied by her schoolboy son, Lord George Hamilton. Not many mornings had elapsed before Mr. Gladstone said to the boy's mother, "Duchess, don't you think it a pity that your son should spend his holidays in entire idleness?I should be happy to give him an hour's Homer every morning." The offer was accepted, and the foundation of Lord George's lifelong hostility to the Liberal leader was securely laid. It is the nervous dread of some such awful possibility which supplies wings to the boy's feet and lies to his tongue when he encounters Dr. Grimstone or Basil Warde in a Swiss hotel.While the Schoolmaster limits his aspirations to the Alps, the Oxford or Cambridge Don, having a longer vacation at his command, takes a more extended view, and urges his adventurous Pilgrimage along roads less trite. A few years ago an Oxford Don resolved to strike out what was then a quite new line, and spend his Long Vacation in Portugal. Conscious of insufficient acquaintance with the Portuguese language, he repaired to Mr. Parker's excellent shop in the Turl and enquired for a Portuguese Phrase-book. After some research, that never-failing bookseller produced "The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English." The book had an instant and a deserved success. The preface sets forth that "a choice of familiar dialogues, clean of gallicisms and despoiled phrases, it was missing yet to studious Portuguese and Brazilian youth; and also to persons of other nations that wish to know the Portuguese language." To supply this felt want Pedro Carolino compiled his hand-book for "the acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the Youth,at which we dedicate him particularly." Among those studious persons was our Pilgrim-Don, who naturally turned in the first instance to a dialogue headed"FOR TO TRAVELWhen do you start?As soon as I shall have to finish a business at Cadiz.Have you already arrested a coach?Yes, sir, and very cheap.Have you great deal of effects?Two trunks and one portmanteau.You may prepare all for to-morrow. We shall start at the coolness.The way, is it good?Very good.At which inn shall stop us?In that of the Sun, it is the best. The account mount is little. The supper, the bed, and the breakfast shall get up at thirty franks.That seems to me a little dear."The next dialogue follows in the natural order:—"FOR TO BREAKFASTJohn, bring us some thing for to breakfast.Yes, sir; there is some sausages and some meat pies. Will you that I bring the ham?Yes, bring him, we will cut a steak.Put an nappe cloth upon this table.Give us some plates, any knifes, and some forks, rinse the glasses.I have eaten with satisfaction some pudding, sausages, and some ham. I shall take some tea.Still a not her cup?I thank you it is enough."Breakfast over, the traveller engages a guide and starts out"FOR TO SEE THE TOWNWe won't to see all that is it remarquable here.Come with me, if you please. I shall not folget nothing what can to merit your attention. Here we are near to cathedraly. Will you come in there?We will first go to see him in oudside, after we shall go in there for to look the interior."A day of sight-seeing concludes happily with the ever-welcome dialogue—"FOR TO DINEGive us a rice soup.What wine do you like best?Bourgogne wine.Give us some beef and potatoes, a beefsteak to the English.What you shall take for dessert?Give us some Hollande cheese and some prunes.I will take a glass of brandy at the cherries.Gentlemen, don't forget the waiter."Parsimony is a bond which makes the whole world kin, and it is interesting to find embedded in 182 closely-printed pages of "despoiled phrases" two such characteristic specimens of sound English as "That seems to me a little dear" and "Don't forget the waiter."

PILGRIMAGES

I use the word in something wider than Chaucer's sense, and yet in a sense not wholly different from his. For, though we no longer make an annual visit to the Shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, still we all feel bound, at least once a year, to go somewhere and do something quite out of our normal course. Perhaps, like Chaucer's friends, we "long" to do this in April, but the claims of business are generally too strong for us; so we have to content ourselves with admiring the peeps of greenery which begin to invade the soot of our urban gardens, and, if we are of a cultured habit, we can always quote Browning's Thrush or strain the kalendar so as to admit Wordsworth's Daffodils.

This notion of a yearly Pilgrimage as a necessity of rightly-ordered life seems to have fallen into a long abeyance. "Dan Chaucer" (for I love to be on easy terms with great men) described the social customs of the fourteenth century, and then the Pilgrimage seems to have been an established institution: "Tom Hughes" described those ofthe eighteenth, and this is what, writing in 1862, he says about the annual Pilgrimages of his own time:—

"I have been credibly informed, and am inclined to believe, that the various Boards of Directors of Railway Companies agreed together some ten years back to buy up the learned profession of Medicine, body and soul. To this end they set apart several millions of money, which they continually distribute judiciously among the Doctors, stipulating only this one thing—that they shall prescribe change of air to every patient who can pay, or borrow money to pay, a railway fare, and see their prescription carried out. If it be not for this, why is it that none of us can be well at home for a year together? It wasn't so twenty years ago—not a bit of it. The Browns did not go out of the county once in five years."

The Browns, as we all know, stood in Mr. Hughes's vocabulary for the Upper Middle Class of England—the class to which the clergy, the smaller squires, and the professional men belong; the class which in Chaucer's time contained the "Man of Lawe," the "Marchande," the "Franklyne," and the "Doctore of Phisyke"; and, although Mr. Hughes, who ought to know, says that in the earlier part of Queen Victoria's reign they were a stay-at-home class, they are now the most regular and the most zealous of Pilgrims. It was the majestic misfortune of the Duke in"Lothair" to have so many houses that he had no home. People so circumstanced do not need to go on Pilgrimages. After the autumn in a Scotch Castle, the winter in a country house in the Midlands, the spring in another in the Southern Counties, and the season in Grosvenor Square, people are glad of a little rest, and seek it in some "proud alcove" on the Thames or a sea-girt villa at Cowes. Unless their livers drive them to Carlsbad or their hearts to Nauheim, they do not travel, but display what Lord Beaconsfield called "the sustained splendour of their stately lives" in the many mansions which, in the aggregate, represent to them the idea of Home. I might perhaps on another occasion sketch the Grand Tour of Europe, on which, for educational purposes, the Earl of Fitzurse used to send his eldest son, young Lord Cubley; compressed, with his tutor and doctor, into a travelling-carriage, with a valet and a courier in the rumble. The Duke of Argyll's Autobiography has just told us what this kind of Pilgrimage was like; but to-day I am dealing with the present rather than the past.

It is the people with one house who go on Pilgrimages nowadays—the impoverished squire, the smoke-dried clergyman, the exhausted merchant, the harried editor. To these must be added all the inhabitants, male and female, of Lodging-land and Flat-land,—all "the dim, common populations" of Stuccovia and Suburbia. Thereare mysterious laws of association which connect classes with localities. Tradesmen love Margate; to clerks Scarborough is dear. The Semitic financier has long claimed Brighton for his own. Costermongers go hop-picking in Kent; artizans disport themselves on the nigger-haunted pier of Southend. Governed by some mysterious law of their being, schoolmasters make straight for the Alps. There they live the strenuous life and brave the perilous ascent; climb and puff and pant all day; rush in, very untidy and not very clean, totable d'hôte; and season their meal with the "shop" of St. Winifred's or the gay banter of Rosslyn Common-room. It is agreeable to watch the forced cordiality, the thin tutorial humour, with which they greet some quite irresponsive pupil who happens to have strayed into the same hotel; and I have often had occasion to admire the precocious dexterity with which the pupil extricates himself from this dreaded companionship. Of Mr. Gladstone it was said by his detractors that he had something of the Schoolmaster in his composition; and this trait was aptly illustrated when, during the summer holidays some fifty years ago, he met the late Duchess of Abercorn in a country house accompanied by her schoolboy son, Lord George Hamilton. Not many mornings had elapsed before Mr. Gladstone said to the boy's mother, "Duchess, don't you think it a pity that your son should spend his holidays in entire idleness?I should be happy to give him an hour's Homer every morning." The offer was accepted, and the foundation of Lord George's lifelong hostility to the Liberal leader was securely laid. It is the nervous dread of some such awful possibility which supplies wings to the boy's feet and lies to his tongue when he encounters Dr. Grimstone or Basil Warde in a Swiss hotel.

While the Schoolmaster limits his aspirations to the Alps, the Oxford or Cambridge Don, having a longer vacation at his command, takes a more extended view, and urges his adventurous Pilgrimage along roads less trite. A few years ago an Oxford Don resolved to strike out what was then a quite new line, and spend his Long Vacation in Portugal. Conscious of insufficient acquaintance with the Portuguese language, he repaired to Mr. Parker's excellent shop in the Turl and enquired for a Portuguese Phrase-book. After some research, that never-failing bookseller produced "The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English." The book had an instant and a deserved success. The preface sets forth that "a choice of familiar dialogues, clean of gallicisms and despoiled phrases, it was missing yet to studious Portuguese and Brazilian youth; and also to persons of other nations that wish to know the Portuguese language." To supply this felt want Pedro Carolino compiled his hand-book for "the acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the Youth,at which we dedicate him particularly." Among those studious persons was our Pilgrim-Don, who naturally turned in the first instance to a dialogue headed

"FOR TO TRAVEL

When do you start?

As soon as I shall have to finish a business at Cadiz.

Have you already arrested a coach?

Yes, sir, and very cheap.

Have you great deal of effects?

Two trunks and one portmanteau.

You may prepare all for to-morrow. We shall start at the coolness.

The way, is it good?

Very good.

At which inn shall stop us?

In that of the Sun, it is the best. The account mount is little. The supper, the bed, and the breakfast shall get up at thirty franks.

That seems to me a little dear."

The next dialogue follows in the natural order:—

"FOR TO BREAKFAST

John, bring us some thing for to breakfast.

Yes, sir; there is some sausages and some meat pies. Will you that I bring the ham?

Yes, bring him, we will cut a steak.

Put an nappe cloth upon this table.

Give us some plates, any knifes, and some forks, rinse the glasses.

I have eaten with satisfaction some pudding, sausages, and some ham. I shall take some tea.

Still a not her cup?

I thank you it is enough."

Breakfast over, the traveller engages a guide and starts out

"FOR TO SEE THE TOWN

We won't to see all that is it remarquable here.

Come with me, if you please. I shall not folget nothing what can to merit your attention. Here we are near to cathedraly. Will you come in there?

We will first go to see him in oudside, after we shall go in there for to look the interior."

A day of sight-seeing concludes happily with the ever-welcome dialogue—

"FOR TO DINE

Give us a rice soup.

What wine do you like best?

Bourgogne wine.

Give us some beef and potatoes, a beefsteak to the English.

What you shall take for dessert?

Give us some Hollande cheese and some prunes.

I will take a glass of brandy at the cherries.

Gentlemen, don't forget the waiter."

Parsimony is a bond which makes the whole world kin, and it is interesting to find embedded in 182 closely-printed pages of "despoiled phrases" two such characteristic specimens of sound English as "That seems to me a little dear" and "Don't forget the waiter."

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