We, who claim Oxford and Cambridge for our nursing mothers, have of all men least excuse to forget it.  A man of Leyden, of Louvain, of Liepzig, of Berlin, may be pardoned that he passes it by.  More than a hundred years ago Salamanca had the most of her stones torn down to make defences against Wellington’s cannon.  Paris, greatest of all, has kept her renown; but you shall search the slums of the Latin Quarter in vain for the sixty or seventy Colleges that, before the close of the fifteenth century, had arisen to adorn her, the intellectual Queen of Europe.  In Bologna, the ancient and stately, almost alone among the continental Universities, survive a few relics of the old collegiate system—­the College of Spain, harbouring some five or six students, and a little house founded for Flemings in 1650:  and in Bologna the system never attained to real importance.

But in England where, great as London is, the national mind has always harked to the country for the graces of life, so that we seem by instinct to see it as only desirable in a green setting, our Universities, planted by the same instinct on lawns watered by pastoral streams, have suffered so little and received as much from the years that now we can hardly conceive of Oxford or Cambridge as ruined save by ’the unimaginable touch of Time.’  Of all the secular Colleges bequeathed to Oxford, she has lost not one; while Cambridge (I believe) has parted only with Cavendish.  Some have been subsumed into newer foundations; but always the process has been one of merging, of blending, of justifying the new bottle by the old wine.  The vengeance of civil war—­always very much of a family affair in England—­has dealt tenderly with Oxford and Cambridge; the more calculating malignity of Royal Commissions not harshly on the whole.  University reformers may accuse both Oxford and Cambridge of

     Annihilating all that’s made
     To a green thought in a green shade: 

but with those sour men we have nothing here to do:  like Isaak Walton’s milkmaid we will not ’load our minds with any fears of many things that will never be.’

But, as they stand, Oxford and Cambridge—­so amazingly alike while they play at differences, and both so amazingly unlike anything else in the wide world—­do by a hundred daily reminders connect us with the Middle Age, or, if you prefer Arnold’s phrase, whisper its lost enchantments.  The cloister, the grave grace in hall, the chapel bell, the men hurrying into their surplices or to lectures ‘with the wind in their gowns,’ the staircase, the nest of chambers within the oak—­all these softly reverberate over our life here, as from belfries, the mediaeval mind.

And that mediaeval mind actively hated (of partial acquaintance or by anticipation) almost everything we now study!  Between it and us, except these memorials, nothing survives to-day but the dreadful temptation to learn, the dreadful instinct in men, as they grow older and wiser, to trust learning after all and endow it—­that, and the confidence of a steady stream of youth.