The new Professor gave up his house in London, and settled at Cherwell Edge, near the famous bathing-place called Parson’ s Pleasure.* He found the University a totally different place from what it was when he first knew it.  Dr. Arnold, who died in 1842, the year after his appointment, was the earliest Professor whose lectures were famous, or were attended, and Dr. Arnold did exactly as he pleased.  There was no Board of Studies to supervise him, and it was thought rather good of a Professor to lecture at all.  Now the Board of Studies was omnipotent, and a Professor’s time was not his own.  He was bound in fact to give forty-two lectures in a year, and to lecture twice a week for seven weeks in two terms out of the three.  The prospect appalled him.  “I never,” he wrote to Max Muller,+ “I never gave a lecture on an historical subject without a fortnight or three weeks of preparation, and to undertake to deliver forty-two such lectures in six months would be to undertake an impossibility.  If the University is to get any good out of me, I must work in my own way.”  He did not, however, work in his own way, and the University got a great deal of good out of him all the same.

—­ * The house is now, oddly enough, a Catholic convent. + April 18th, 1892. —­

Lord Salisbury, in making Froude the offer, spoke apologetically of the stipend as small, but added that the work would be light.  The accomplished Chancellor was imperfectly informed.  The stipend was small enough:  the work was extremely hard for a man of seventy-four.  Froude’s conscientiousness in preparation was almost excessive.  Every lecture was written out twice from notes for improvement of style and matter.  His audiences were naturally large, for not since the days Mr. Goldwin Smith, who resigned in 1866, had anything like Froude’s lectures been heard at Oxford.  When I was an undergraduate, in the seventies, we all of course knew that Professor Stubbs had a European reputation for learning.  But, except to those reading for the History School, Stubbs was a name, and nothing more.  Nobody ever dreamt of going to hear him.  Crowds flocked to hear Froude, as in my time they flocked to hear Ruskin.

One sex was as well represented as the other.  Froude had left the dons celibate and clerical.  He found them, for the most part, married and lay.  There was every variety of opinion in the common rooms, and every variety of perambulators in the parks.  London hours had been adopted, and the society, though by no means frivolous or ostentatious, was anything rather than monastic.  At Oxford, as in London, Froude was almost always the best talker in the room.  He had travelled, not so much in Europe as in America and the more distant parts of the British Empire.  He had read almost everything, and known almost every one.  His boyish enthusiasm for deeds of adventure was not abated.  He believed in soldiers and sailors, especially sailors.  Creeds, Parliaments, and